LSBRAR OF CONGRESS. 

Shelf 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Conditional Immortality 



" When once this weighty question of the after-life 
has been opened, a controversy will ensue, in the 
progress of which it will be discovered that, with 
unobservant eyes, we and our predecessors have been 
so walking up and down and running hither and 
thither, among dim notices and indications of the 
future destinies of the human family, as to have failed 
to gather up or to regard much that has lain upon the 
pages of the Bible, open and free to our use." 

Isaac Taylor. 



W- 



Conditional Immortality 

PLAIN SERMONS 
ON A TOPIC OF PRESENT INTEREST 



BY 

William R. Huntington, D.D. 

Rector of All Saints Churchy Worcester 
















■ 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

1878 



lr 






Copyright by 
E. P. BUTTON & CO., 

1878, 



The Library 
OS Conor ESS 

WASHINGTON 



PREFACE. 



Charles Frederick Hudson's Debt and Grace, 
and Edward White's Life in Christ, are likely- 
long to remain, what they are at present, the 
classical authorities on the subject of conditional 
immortality. 

The mere fact that I am disposed to be a little 
less confident and positive than these writers in 
stating results, satisfied with likelihood where they 
seem to find certitude, or a very near approach to 
certitude, would not of itself justify me in attempt- 
ing to add a word to what has already been by 
them admirably said. Agreeing with them, as I 
do, in their main drift, I ought, if this were all, to 
be well content to remain silent. 

There are, however, those whose attention can- 
not be secured for elaborate treatises unless some 

v 



VI PREFACE. 

measure of interest in the subject treated has 
been previously aroused by arguments briefly put 
and easily understood. 

I therefore venture to print these unambitious 
Sermons, originally prepared for parochial use, 
hoping that, slight and sketchy as they are, they 
may serve to win a hearing for voices better worth 
listening to than mine. It may be well to add 
that Sermons I., II., and IX., although germane 
to the general subject, are not essential to the 
integrity of the argument. 

W. R. H. 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON PAGE 

I. The Eternal Purpose i 

II. The Argument for Retribution 20 

III. Possible Forms of Penalty 40 

IVc The Hypothesis of Everlasting Torment 58 

V. The Hypothesis of Final Restoration 80 

VI. The Hypothesis of Conditional Immortality 100 

VII. The Likeliest Belief 121 

VIII. Christ's Law of Survival 143 

IX. The Heaven for Man 164 



NOTE 

A. The bearing of St. Paul's polemical training as a Pharisee 

upon his use of the expression Z>ooi) aiaovioZ and kindred 

phrases 185 

- 

B. Atomic and Molecular Analogies in the case of the Soul. 188 

C. The Teaching of the Book of Common Prayer as to Life 

in Christ 192 

vii 



Conditional Immortality. 



i. 

The Eternal Purpose. 

Eph. iii : ii. 
The eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

The greatest men are the men of strongest and 
clearest purpose. When a thing is to be done, 
and done well, we instinctively choose for the 
doing it a man who knows what he is about, 
who has a clear vision of the end to be attained, 
and a quick way of determining the means by 
which to reach it. When we say of a life, that it 
is an aimless one, we are borrowing our figure of 
speech from the archer and his mark. How many 
ways there are in which an arrow or a bullet may 
miss the target ! But the path of a perfectly sue- 



2 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

cessful shot is single : the slightest slant up or 
down, to the right or to the left, would have 
spoiled the aim. 

Now, we know to our cost that in life as it is, 
this perfection of success is never reached. We 
may be able to point to this or that one among 
our acquaintances who, we say, has perfectly suc- 
ceeded ; but we may be sure that, if the power 
were granted us of entering into that person's con- 
sciousness, and knowing him as he know T s himself, 
we should find that we were mistaken. We should 
discover a wide gap between the thing accom- 
plished as we saw and judged it before we crossed 
the threshold of that other mind, and the purpose 
which, now that we have got within, we are able 
to see in all the grandeur of its true proportions. 

Nevertheless, and in spite of this, it remains 
true that the great lives are, as I have said, the 
lives that have an evident aim, and the great men 
the men who are pushing forward with resolute, 
fixed purpose toward an object. The fact that the 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 3 

bolt always falls short, and that the purpose in- 
variably fails, in no degree lessens the strength of 
this conviction of ours that aims and purposes are 
praiseworthy. The very emblems of the broken 
pillar and the snapped thread draw their dignity 
from the purpose they suggest, rather than from 
the failure they confess. The pillar was meant to 
bear up a roof, the thread was intended to be 
woven into some fabric of use or beauty; and it 
is of this purpose which might have been served, 
this end which might have been accomplished, — 
it is of this that we think, and are sad. 

14 The fame is quenched that I foresaw, 
The head hath missed an earthly wreath : n 

so sings the mourner ; but the remembrance 
that the fame would have been achieved, had time 
allowed, and that the purpose would have been 
crowned at last, is the precious thought, after all. 
Yes, we do honor always and in every one great- 
ness of purpose, and whether the measure of 
attainment happen to be less or more, we still 



4 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

reverence the intention ; we say of the life, " It 
was well-planned, nobly conceived: a clear aim 
was in it, a brave design." Now, is it not a very 
strange thing that while all people, or almost all, 
are willing to go as far as this, so many should 
insist on stopping short just here, and refuse to 
credit Almighty God with that characteristic, the 
lack of which in our fellow-men we blame? How 
little we think and how little we say about the 
purposes of Him who made us ! If anybody in 
whom we are interested, or for whom we feel 
responsible, is living a purposeless life, showing 
plainly, by what he does and leaves undone, that 
in his mind there lies no plan, not even an outline 
sketch of what he desires his life to be — why, then, 
we feel anxious ; we wonder if something cannot 
be done to mend the matter ; we say, " The boy 
is throwing himself away ; what a sad waste it is ! " 
But all the while we are content to look about 
upon this marvellous world in which we live ; to 
watch the wheels of Nature's processes as they 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 5 

turn round and round ; to observe the changes 
that come over the face of society, the rise of new 
political powers, the fall of ancient institutions, 
the ebb and flow in the tide of human affairs, 
without ever giving ourselves the trouble to think 
whether a plan underlies the whole thing, whether 
an intelligent, distinct, slowly-fulfilling purpose 
runs through it all. How are we to account for 
this indifference ? Why is it that, comparatively, 
so few take any interest at all in a question which 
it would seem ought to stimulate curiosity to the 
last point, and so compel attention?- — for what- 
ever makes us curious makes us attentive too. 

Several reasons may be given for this sluggish- 
ness of the mind. In the first place, there are a 
great many people who do not like to be remind- 
ed of the existence of any other world than that 
in which they are buying and selling, travelling, 
building, intriguing, and gossipping. 

Well aware that, if there be another plan than 
that plan upon which they themselves are endeav- 



6 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

oring to get the most out of life, it is likely to be 
one in conflict with their own, they would rather 
not hear about it. Any purpose, especially that 
of a stronger being than themselves — any purpose 
likely to thwart their own purpose is something of 
which they do not care to be informed. Any- 
thing connected with the dark side of life, as it is 
called — any contact with suffering or death, they 
shun because it compels them, if they let it come 
too near, to open their eyes to a class of facts 
quite out of keeping with their chosen way of 
looking at things. No, they would much rather 
not hear anything at all about the purpose or the 
purposes of God. They may not be themselves 
the fools who say in their hearts, " There is no 
God ; " but they are always ready to applaud 
any fool who will say it with his lips. 

These are no new-comers on the earth. They 
have been here many, many years. As long ago 
as in Job's day they were known and recognized. 
He speaks of them as the men who say to God, 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 7 

" Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge 
of thy ways. What is the Almighty that we 
should serve him ? or what profit should we have 
if we pray unto him ? " 

Let us remember these as the people who are 
indifferent to the purpose of God. 

There are others who may be better described ■ 
as being perplexed about the purpose of God. 
They do not deny that there may be a God, and 
that He may have a purpose ; but to their eyes the 
things that happen here on earth have such a 
tangled look, that they despair of ever being able 
to trace any connected meaning in them. 

They look at Nature, and it seems to them like 
a great loom which is for ever weaving the same 
fabric, the pattern changing from moment to mo- 
ment, but only to reappear again in the same form 
and the same order after a certain number of revo- 
lutions of the shaft. They study the history of 
human affairs in the past, and there also they 
fail to find what is to them satisfactory evidence 



8 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

of the presence of a purposeful mind directing 
and controlling the general movement of events. 
They look about them in the present. They 
watch the currents of contemporary thought; 
they consider what is done upon the earth ; they 
note the contest going on between the good and 
the evil, sometimes apparently to the advantage 
of the one, and sometimes to the advantage of 
the other : and here also they profess themselves 
baffled. - " If there be a purpose, it eludes us," 
they say ; " we cannot read it distinctly enough to 
be sure about it ; therefore it is a waste of time 
and of patience to be forever searching after the 
plan of God. Let us take things as we find them, 
and, without looking too curiously into the rea- 
sons why they are as they are, live along as best 
we may and with as much contentment as we can 
command." Let us think of these as the people 
who are perplexed about the purposes of God. 
They would not be indifferent to them if they be- 
lieved them to be discoverable ; but they are con- 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 9 

vinced that there is no such thing as finding them 
out, and that, for them, is the end of it. 

There is still another class, entirely distinct from 
either of the two I have described, who would 
rather not hear much said about the purpose of 
God, because the very phrase itself is associated 
in their minds with a doctrine which they consider 
equivalent to fatalism. 

Fatalism is an opinion which few in Christian 
lands openly profess, but which very many secret- 
ly hold. Fatalism is the belief that things are as 
they are and happen as they do, because they 
could not be or happen otherwise. The fatalist 
says of his life that, from first to last, it is the re- 
sult of causes which lay far back of itself, and for 
which he personally can in no wise be held respon- 
sible. For whatever he does that is right, he is 
entitled to no credit, and for whatever he does 
that is wrong, he is deserving of no blame, for the 
reason that these things were, all of them, settled 
ages before he was born, so that the good and the 



IO THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

evil have alike been done under restraint, and 
from necessity. 

Various fine names have been invented of late 
years for this way of looking at things ; but the 
old-fashioned word "fatalism" cannot be im- 
proved. Many a life among us is sunless and full 
of gloom because shadowed by this dark belief. 
Many a man has been made desperately wicked 
by coming under the power of it. You remember 
the strong way in which one of the old Hebrew 
prophets upbraids some of his countrymen who 
were trying to palliate their iniquities by this plea 
of destiny — " Behold," he says, " ye trust in lying 
words that cannot profit. Will ye steal, murder, 
and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn 
incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods 
whom ye know not, and come and stand before 
me in this house which is called by my name, and 
say, l We are delivered to do all these abomina- 
tions ? ' ' Those were the fatalists of that time. 
"We are delivered," they argued — "handed over 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. II 

by a power greater than our own to do these 
things, and help ourselves we cannot." 

Now, there is no doubt that there have been 
periods when Christian teachers have come danger- 
ously near to fatalism in their efforts to emphasize 
and enforce the truth that a divine purpose guides 
and governs the order of human affairs. There 
have been times in the history of New England 
when the truth about the purpose of God was 
set forth in such a distorted form, and the line 
between the elect and the* non-elect drawn with 
such particularity and arbitrariness, that men were 
not to blame for thinking and saying that fatalism 
had usurped the place of the Gospel, and that 
their preachers were giving them stones for bread ; 
for stony, hard, and heavy it is — this doctrine of a 
compelling destiny, and the soul can draw no 
more nourishment from it than the body can from 
flint or granite. And so it has come to pass, that 
besides those who do not care to hear about the 
purposes of God, because they are indifferent to 



12 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

things spiritual altogether, and besides those who 
refuse to listen because they are perplexed, there 
are also those who are conscious of a certain timid- 
ity about the subject, because they know how 
easy it is to drop into fatalism and recklessness in 
their ways of thinking about God and duty, and 
they are apprehensive that for them to dwell 
much upon the purpose of God might result in 
their coming to believe that His purpose in their 
own case was not a purpose of love and salvation, 
but a purpose of rejection and doom. 

To judge from the tone of current literature, 
this state of mind is very prevalent at the pres- 
ent time. Belief in the eternal purpose of God in 
Christ Jesus has been put into the background. 
Hatred for the stern dogma of the divine decrees 
as taught by the Puritans has thrown many 
minds into an attitude of antagonism toward the 
truth, of which that dogma was a distortion and a 
caricature. In loosing our grasp of a worthless 
husk we have let fall a precious fruit. 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 1 3 

For among all the truths of religion there really 
is not one more uplifting and inspiriting than that 
which our text enshrines, " the eternal purpose 
which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." 

For what does it mean ? Why, it means briefly 
that this world and all things in it are being gov- 
erned in accordance with the principles set forth 
by Jesus Christ. It means that we are moving, 
perhaps slowly, perhaps more quickly than we 
think, but, at any rate, surely, to a great and glo- 
rious triumph of the good and the right over the 
bad and the wrong. It means that God is not in- 
different, as sometimes it seems to us that He 
must be, to the guilt and suffering which make 
the burden of the world's life, but in due time will 
recompense and adjust. Is it no comfort, think 
you, to be assured of this at times when the heart 
is sick and the head faint at the thought of there 
being no God, no Heavenly Father, no one to 
care whether the righteous or the wicked prevail, 
no Arbiter, no Lawgiver, no Judge ? It is a mis- 



14 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

take to imagine that any taint of fatalism neces- 
sarily attaches to this belief in a purpose on God's 
part which events are certain to fulfil. A man 
of strong will says to himself, " I desire to com- 
pass a certain end ; I mean to occupy a definite 
position already selected in my own mind, and, if 
I live, I shall do so, for I am determined to make 
everything bend to the carrying out of that one 
purpose/' A resolve of this sort, it is true, not 
seldom fails of accomplishment ; but sometimes, as 
we know, it does not fail — it succeeds. For the 
sake of illustration, take the case when such a re- 
solve does succeed, — will any one pretend that the 
will of the successful man has acted like a spell of 
destiny upon the chain of intervening events be- 
tween the moment when the purpose was formed 
and the moment when it was crowned with success ? 
Does any one suppose that, had these intervening 
events been other than they were, the purpose 
could not have been accomplished ? Certainly not. 
Every one would acknowledge that just as the 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 1 5 

man's powerful will had compelled one set of cir- 
cumstances to serve his purpose, so might it have 
compelled another, or another, or another set to 
have helped him on to the same end. Call to 
mind any famous historical character who has 
risen from obscurity to eminence by dint of reso- 
lute purpose, — is it not manifestly absurd to say of 
him that he never would have attained the height 
he did, had a single one of the circumstances 
that surrounded him been other than it was ? * 

And yet this is the way in which many people 
allow themselves to think about the only perfect 

*At Mrs. Norton's house Lord Melbourne met Mr. Disraeli, 
now Lord Beaconsfield, then only a young and nameless adven- 
turer, who had just been defeated as a candidate for the House of 
Commons. " The minister was attracted more and more, as he 
listened to the uncommonplace language and spirit of the young 
politician, and thought to himself that he would be well worth se- 
curing. Abruptly, but with a certain tone of kindness which took 
away any air of assumption, he said, ' Well, now, tell me what you 
want to be? ' The quiet gravity of the reply fairly took him aback, 
' I want to be prime minister.' " — Memoirs of the Right Hon. Wil- 
liam, second Viscount Melbourne, by W. M. Torrens, M.P. -, 



1 6 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

will there is, namely, the will of God. They say 
that the purposes of that will cannot be carried 
out unless all that comes between the forming of 
the purpose and the attainment of it is absolutely 
controlled by destiny. Why not ? One may fairly 
ask, Why not ? Are we to think of the Supreme 
Will as less able to compass its end in the 
face of all sorts of difficulties than a human 
will is ? A man carries his point, and he carries 
it because he has set his heart on carrying it, no 
matter what happens; and it occurs to no one to 
suspect that he has succeeded because he pos- 
sessed a power to decree that things should hap- 
pen in just the way best suited to his purpose. 
Why, then, should we say of ourselves that if God 
has a purpose about the world, and knows what is 
to happen to it in the end, it must necessarily be 
that all we accomplish in the way of choice is 
done under the compulsion of a stronger will 
than our own, a will that cannot be resisted, a 
stern destiny, an iron doom? 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 1 7 

No, we may believe in the existence of the pur- 
pose and in the certainty of its accomplishment, 
and at the same time honestly believe, too, that it 
is open to us to choose whether or not we per- 
sonally shall have a share in the carrying out of 
the plan ; whether we personally shall be among 
those who help forward or among those who try 
to push back the great work of God. If we are 
not under compulsion when we serve to further 
one of our neighbor's cherished plans — and we 
well know that we are not, — why need we sup- 
pose ourselves to be under compulsion when what 
we do is turned to account in the accomplishment 
of the eternal purpose of the Lord our Maker? 

But what is this eternal purpose purposed in 
Christ Jesus? That is the question of deepest im- 
port the text suggests. What is the eternal pur- 
pose ?. The New Testament gives the answer in 
various forms, but everywhere it is in substance the 
same. The eternal purpose is the final establish- 
ment — whether here on this earth or elsewhere is 



1 8 THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 

not distinctly told us — the final establishment 
of a great commonwealth of souls, of which holi- 
ness shall be the law and perfect charity the at- 
mosphere. This final result is called, sometimes 
the Kingdom of Heaven, sometimes the City of 
God, sometimes the New Jerusalem, sometimes 
the Church, sometimes the Bride — the Lamb's 
Wife ; and the process by which the end is to 
be reached is also variously named : now it is 
"the perfecting of the saints ;" again it is the 
" edifying or building-up of the body of Christ ; " 
again it is the " bringing of many sons unto 
glory :" but, whatever the phraseology, whether 
as regards the end or the means, the King- 
dom itself or the process of building up the 
Kingdom, one thing is always fixed, always the 
same, always distinctly and clearly put, so that 
there can be no mistaking it ; and that is the abso- 
lute dependence of the whole upon the person of 
the Son of God. The divine purpose is not only 
declared to be and to have been an eternal one, but 



THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. 19 

it is an eternal purpose purposed in Christ Jesus 
our Lord. A Christianity cut loose from Christ, 
made independent of his person, freed from his 
supremacy, may have much to say for itself ; but 
this it must not, cannot say — that it is the religion 
which apostles preached and for which martyrs 
died. The teaching of the Gospel is that in Jesus 
Christ we have the key to human history. Leave 
him, and presently we find ourselves " in wander- 
ing mazes lost." The Christian solution of the 
problem leaves many things unexplained ; but 
cast away the Christian solution, and we have, 
not many things, but all things, folded deep in 
doubt. 



II. 

The Argument for Retribution. 

Isa. iii : 10, n. 

Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him ; for they 
shall eat the fruit of their doings. 

Woe unto the wicked ! It shall be ill with him ; for the reward 
of his hands shall be given him. 

THUS much with respect to the problem of 
human destiny all the prophets of God, ancient 
and modern, have felt themselves empowered to 
utter. Some of them have been moved to say- 
very much more; none of them have been dis- 
posed to say very much less. Common to them 
all has been this broad basis of agreement — that 
with the righteous it shall be well, with the wicked 
it shall be ill. No doubt, the moment we set foot 

upon this common ground in a spirit of inquiry 

20 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 21 

difficulties spring up to meet us like armed men. 
What, for instance, is the future into which the 
prophet is looking? Is it a limited or a limitless 
one ? is it bounded by the horizon of this life ? or 
does it stretch out far beyond the threescore 
years and ten ? Who are the righteous ? and by 
what tests may we distinguish them from the 
wicked, so as to know certainly upon whom the 
blessing is to fall, and upon whom the woe ? And, 
further still, of what sort is the blessing and of 
wfrat sort the woe ? Is it, on the one hand, a bless- 
ing wholly unalloyed with grief ? Is it, on the 
other, a woe not mitigated by any ray of pity from 
without ? 

These are not captious or unreasonable ques- 
tions ; they are natural, fair, and to the point. But 
does the fact that it is possible to ask them de- 
stroy the value of what I have called the common 
basis of agreement furnished by the text ? Cer- 
tainly not. From a clearing in a forest, the woods- 
men who have lost their way strike out in all 



22 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

directions, each choosing his own path, and blaz- 
ing it as he advances ; but it is a great thing for 
all of the party that there is the clearing to turn 
back to, for only so can those who were mistaken 
meet and rejoin the one who happened to be 
right. In religious discussions, especially in such 
of them as cover regions of profound mystery, we 
ought to remember more constantly than we do 
that the interest of each is the interest of all, and 
the interest of all the interest of each ; and instead 
of starting from our differences to see if we cannot 
bring about a forced agreement, we ought to start 
from our agreements to see if we cannot harmo- 
nize our differences. The agreement in this case, 
the open spot from which Christian thinkers may 
best start in search of the truth about man's future, 
is the general declaration of the text, that with 
the righteous it shall be well in time to come, and 
with the unrighteous ill. 

But before setting out upon any such investiga- 
tion ourselves — and presently I shall propose that 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 23 

we do this very thing — let us look for a little while 
at the reasons why it has proved easy to secure so 
large a measure of agreement as has been, in point 
of fact, secured among men as to this single point 
of belief, that retribution is to come. In a word, 
why are so many ready to assent without dispute 
to the statement that in some way, and at some 
time, the way and time not being too accurately 
defined, all men will receive their just deserts, 
whether of good or evil ? I do not believe that 
any single reason will suffice to explain this very 
general unanimity. It is a result that comes from 
various causes working together, rather than from 
any isolated one. People have concluded that, on 
the whole, it is most likely so to be. But the 
foundation of the likelihood is complex. In part, 
no doubt, the persuasion has its source in what 
our senses tell us of the world without us and 
around us. Fire burns, water drowns, and cold 
freezes without the slightest partiality. Loosen 
the rock that holds it in its place, and down the 



24 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

avalanche comes upon the passing traveller, be 
he Caesar or peasant. And not only is Nature no 
respecter of persons, as concerns rank and dignity, 
but she appears to make no allowance for igno- 
rance, to have no compassion for innocence, and 
to pay no regard to penitence. The unwitting 
offence of the inexperienced child is visited as 
relentlessly as the conscious transgression of the 
man who might have known better ; and the same 
flame that shrivels pitilessly the outstretched hand 
of Cranmer at the stake carries genial warmth to 
the bad-hearted persecutor standing a little way 
removed. Such is " natural law," as we name it, an 
awful reality, which we blink out of sight at our 
peril. Such is the method that force uses in the 
realm of which our eyes and ears and finger-tips 
take cognizance. 

When, now, we turn our thoughts away from 
these sequences of cause and effect in the outer 
world of earth and air and sea, and bend them in- 
ward, upon that world invisible which is the dwell- 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 2$ 

ing-place of the soul, when we do this, we find a 
state of things partly resembling and partly differ- 
ing from what we discerned in external Nature. 
We find a law asserting itself through a voice 
which says, " Thou shalt," and " Thou shalt not ; " 
but we by no means find penalty following upon 
transgression with the same promptitude and cer- 
tainty. In Nature the headsman's axe falls with 
the precision of mechanism, but in this inner 
world of spirit it hangs trembling, and often seems 
never to drop at all. No doubt there is always a 
protest on the part of the law-giving voice every 
time its word "Thou shalt " is disobeyed. We call 
it the rebuke of conscience. But, strangely enough, 
the protest grows more and more inaudible, the 
more frequently it is disregarded, until, finally, in 
many instances, it dies away into silence, and the 
sin which has become a habit is followed by no per- 
ceptible pain. Now, is it to be wondered at that 
men, observing this marked contrast between the 
inevitableness of penalty in the world of Nature, 



26 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

and the seeming uncertainty of it in the world of 
spirit, should argue that since the same God reigns 
in both worlds, and is likely to be working on 
the same principles in both, the probability must 
be that, for reasons known to Himself, He is re- 
serving at least a portion of the retribution due 
the law-breaker till a future day? This is one 
argument in favor of a judgment to come, a very 
simple and easy one. I do not say it proves the 
point ; I only say it makes in favor of it. Take 
another argument, also drawn from what we ob- 
serve of the workings of the Creative Mind in 
Nature. Everywhere in the universe, so far as we 
are able to study it, there seems to prevail a ten- 
dency or disposition to keep things evenly adjust- 
ed. The thought I have in mind finds expression 
in the common saying, that in the long run Nature 
may be depended upon to balance her books. 
The sun draws no more water from the sea than 
the lakes are able to receive and the rivers to car- 
ry back. Immense as is the pressure of the atmo- 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 2J 

sphere upon every hair's-breadth of surface, we 
move about in it unconscious of discomfort be- 
cause our own powers of resistance have been 
exactly proportioned to the need. In hundreds 
and thousands of ways, many of which the curious 
mind of man is only just beginning to understand, 
this principle of equilibrium or balance asserts it- 
self. Can it be that the principle has no applica- 
tion to the ordering of human life ? its mysteri- 
ous inequalities, its seemingly so ill-proportioned 
justice ? This is the burden that has weighed on 
sensitive consciences and aching hearts since the 
world began, or, at least, since men began to think. 
" The tabernacles of robbers prosper," cries Job, 
dismayed at his own reversal of fortune, " and 
they that provoke God are secure; . . . their 
houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God 
upon them." He tries, as well as he can, to meet 
the difficulty by reminding himself of the many 
instances in which we do actually see wickedness 
repaid with penalty in this world, but he cannot 



28 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

help feeling, even after he has spoken of these tem- 
poral judgments, how little force there really is in 
an argument built upon exceptions, and he falls 
back upon the hard fact, that " one dieth in his full 
strength, being wholly at ease and quiet, and 
another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and 
never eateth with pleasure/' And he adds, "They 
shall lie down alike in the dust." 

Now, the only way out of this difficulty for any 
one who believes that God is not only a strong 
Maker, but also a King of men holy and just, is to 
let the eye take in a larger sweep of time than the 
days of our age on earth can bound, and to con- 
clude that, in the eternal years, compensations 
may be brought about, addings and substractions 
made, which in the end will secure a balance as 
absolutely perfect as that which holds the stars to 
their courses. It was in this temper of reliance 
that the baffled but still trustful mind of Abraham 
cried out to God, "Shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right?" Perhaps, to him listening, there 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 29 

came down, in answer, the distant music of the 
song, " Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord 
God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou 
king of saints." Here, then, we have a second ar- 
gument from Nature in favor of some destined re- 
adjustment of man's lot in the age or the ages to 
come. The working of the principle of balance in 
the world we see suggests the working of the same 
principle in the world we cannot see. I do not 
say of the argument that it is conclusive ; I only 
say that it helps toward a conclusion. 

Again, men find as a matter of fact, and as a 
result of experience, that it is impossible for them 
to live together in society without some code of 
law, and that it is equally impossible to carry out 
the law without attaching to it some scheme of 
rewards and punishments. In the civil state, 
quite as really as in the kingdom of God, there is 
need of a voice to say to the righteous it shall be 
well with him, and to the wicked it shall be ill 
with him. No doubt, we can imagine a condition 



30 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

of things in which the simple publication of the 
law as the will of the rightful ruler would of itself 
suffice to secure absolute obedience and complete 
order. But we know perfectly well that, as a mat- 
ter of historical fact, no such community, keeping 
law for law's own sake, ever existed. Common- 
wealths there have been and are in which law does 
its work and maintains its sanctity with less aid 
from the motives of hope and fear in the hearts of 
the citizens than is elsewhere found necessary; 
but, nowhere, it is safe to assert — nowhere does 
the nation, the province, the city, the town, the 
village or the family exist where the principle of 
retribution (and retribution, be it remembered, is 
a word that applies equally to reward and punish- 
ment) can be wholly dropped out of the scheme 
of government without damage to the interests of 
law. 

Well, then, is it strange that the great bulk of 
men, seeing how potent a part of the enginery of 
control is furnished by the appeal to hope and 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 3 1 

fear, should hold it likely that the Maker of the 
human race means to employ these motives in 
ruling the race that He has made ? And, further, is 
it strange that, seeing how partial and imperfect 
the distribution upon earth of these divine re- 
wards and punishments appears to be, they should 
fall back on the belief that, to a great extent, the 
final distribution of them is reserved for scenes 
other than those in which we are moving now ? 
Thus we arrive at a third reason for believing in 
the retributions of a life to come. Mans own 
poor attempts at governing himself and his fellow- 
creatures show him the necessity of enlisting hope 
and fear as aids to the efficient administration of 
the law. I do not call the argument demonstra- 
tive ; I call it highly suggestive. 

But we must not leave the question here. 
There is more to be said. Thus far we have been 
dealing only with considerations of the kind tech- 
nically called analogical. We have been com- 
paring one thing with another, natural law with 



32 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

spiritual, human governance with divine, and rea- 
soning from like to like. Listen, now, for a few 
moments to an argument of a wholly different 
sort. 

From time to time, in the history of the past, 
there have appeared on earth, and notably within 
a definite region and among the people of a 
particular race, certain men of marked spiritual 
stature who have claimed for themselves the title 
of prophet or messenger of God. First and last, 
there have been many of these preachers of right- 
eousness, these spokesmen of Jehovah, but some of 
them so conspicuously overtopped the rest, gained 
such mastery over the thought of their times, that 
their names have come down to us as the names 
of "the prophets/' and they stand before us the 
representatives of the great fellowship of which 
they formed a part. Enoch, the seventh from 
Adam, who walked with God, was one of these ; 
Noah was another; Moses, lawgiver indeed, but 
prophet also, another; Samuel and David, Elijah 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 33 

and Elisha, Isaiah and Ezekiel, — I need not re- 
count them : their names and their words have 
been familiar to us from childhood. What I 
would have you remember about them, is the fact 
that as a company of preachers they bore con- 
sistent testimony to a purpose on God's part to 
bring the world to judgment. Through the dim- 
ness of the time in which they moved, with the 
smoke of idolatrous altars clouding their sky, and 
the noise of tumult roughly breaking in upon the 
stillness of the soul, they patiently, believingly, 
serenely looked forward, and pointed their fellows 
forward, to a day when He who had made the 
world would judge the world. Not as a matter 
of conjecture, not by arguments from analogy, 
such as I have thus far been using, but (so they 
alleged), with authority and by commission from 
the Most High, they stoutly taught these two 
companion truths : the Lord is righteous, and He 
shall come to be our Judge. 



34 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

At last we find ourselves in the presence of 
Him to whom all the prophets lead up, Him who 
is King and Priest and Prophet all in one ; and 
what has He to tell us ? simply this — that to Him 
all judgment has been committed, that in Him 
we see the Judge. He scruples not to picture 
Himself to us as seated on the clouds of 
heaven ; armies of angels make the background 
of the scene, and before Him is assembled the 
whole vast family of man. Take out of this 
majestic vision as much as you choose under 
the name of figure and imagery and similitude, 
hush the sound of the archangel's trump, and 
lengthen, if you will, the day of judgment till it 
cover a thousand years or twenty thousand, there 
yet remains to be explained away, if explain 
it away you can, the momentous prediction from 
the lips of that preacher who has secured more 
listeners than any who ever spoke before or since ; 
there yet remains, I say, the momentous predic- 
tion of a time when God shall judge the world in 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 35 

righteousness by that man whom He hath or- 
dained. 

I have been laboring to build up, as you see, a 
cumulative argument in defence of the doctrine of 
retribution. Observe the successive stages by 
which we have advanced : first, we noted the pres- 
ence of suffering in Nature as the penalty of 
broken law ; next, we studied the principle of bal- 
ance as it manifests itself in the same sphere ; then, 
turning from Nature to human society, we marked 
the absolute necessity of some system of rewards 
and punishment in connection with the adminis- 
tration of law ; from society we passed to history, 
and listened to the voices of the prophets ; thus, 
starting from Nature's symbols, we have worked 
our way on and up to the spoken word of Him 
whom Christians recognize as Nature's Lord and 
only true interpreter. 

No doubt, at every step of the process there has 
been room for cavil and plausible objection ; but 
the question is whether, taking all these considera- 



36 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

tions that I have urged together and in the mass, 
they do not carry great weight of persuasion, a 
momentum of probability quite sufficient to justify 
the strong language of the text : " Say ye to the 
righteous it shall be well with him ; woe to the 
wicked, it shall be ill with him." And yet all that 
has been thus far said only brings us to the thresh- 
old of the subject in hand. We have been look- 
ing into foundations, or, to speak more accurately, 
we have been surveying the ground upon which it 
is proposed to lay a foundation. 

The question of the nature and the extent of 
the retributions which we have seen it to be a 
not irrational thing to anticipate yet remains 
untouched. With this question, in its various 
phases, I purpose, God willing, to attempt to deal 
in my Sunday-morning sermons during Lent. 

How weighty the responsibility incurred in 
making the effort I think I fully understand and 
keenly appreciate. In the presence of a problem 
so awful one might well covet the privilege of si- 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 37 

lence. But, as even the cynic among the prophets 
admits, there is a time to speak as well as a time 
to keep silence. And it does seem that when the 
mind of the community is very generally agitated 
upon a question of deep spiritual import, the duty 
of the honest minister of Christ is to do the best 
he can, poor as that best may be, to lead those 
who care to trust his guidance to right and just 
conclusions. To no one can it be matter of small 
concern what his belief shall be with reference to 
the destiny of those who sleep. If Nature has 
anything to tell, if reason has anything to tell, if 
Scripture has anything to tell, we want to know 
what it is. It is little to the credit of any man's 
intelligence, let alone his conscience and his heart, 
to boast that he does not care. 

I do not forget, indeed I have already reminded 
you, that retribution has its bright as well as its 
dark side. There is a retribution of good as well 
as a retribution of evil, though it must be confessed 
that it is highly characteristic of our disposition 



38 THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 

to think the worst things of God rather than the 
best, of our tendency to dread instead of trust- 
ing Him, that we have let the gloomy aspect of 
the word so cloud and cover the cheerful phase 
of it, that the very mention of " retribution " car- 
ries terror with it. The Son of Man came not to 
destroy men's lives, but to save them, and the 
retribution to those on His right hand is at least as 
worthy of our thankful recognition as the retribu- 
tion to those on His left hand is worthy of our 
fear. 

It is not at all out of forgetfulness of this larger 
way of looking at the whole subject that I ask you 
to approach the problem from the side of loss and 
punishment, rather than from the side of blessed- 
ness and reward ; but partly because the present 
awakening of inquiry has more to do with the 
character of the penalty than with the character 
of the reward ; partly because, in the movement of 
the Christian year, Easter may, more properly 
than Lent, bring in thoughts about Heaven and 



THE ARGUMENT FOR RETRIBUTION. 39 

the things of Heaven ; and partly because in Na- 
ture's order it is usual for the darkness to come 
before the light, even as "the evening and the 
morning were the first day." 



III. 

Possible Forms of Penalty. 

i. Peter iv : 17. 

, . . What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel 
of God? 

Although his question admits of no fewer 
than six different answers, the apostle is content 
with asking it. He puts on record no reply — cer- 
tainly no prompt and plain reply. He leaves us 
to infer from his tone that the doom of the un- 
godly and the sinner is a fearful one, but precisely 
wherein the fearfulness consists he fails to state ; 
just what the end shall be of them that obey not 
the gospel of God he does not say. 

It is on account of this very circumstance that I 

have taken the words as a text for this morning's 

sermon. Verses of Holy Scripture abound, any 

one of which, looked at by itself, might be under- 

40 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 41 

stood as settling forever and beyond controversy 
the question which this verse raises, but does not 
settle. Why should we pass by these apparently 
decisive sayings of the Bible, and take up with 
such an evidently indecisive one instead? Why 
preach from a text that opens the whole question, 
when a text might have been found that would 
have sufficed, not only to open the question, but 
to close it? 

The answer is obvious. We must do one thing 
at a time. Opening the question is quite enough 
for the present; it will be well to think about 
closing it after we have carefully considered the 
subject in its length and breadth, or, at any rate, 
so far considered it as the limitations of pulpit- 
teaching will allow. If those other and apparently 
decisive verses to which I have referred were all 
of them decisive in the same direction, then, in- 
deed, it would have been well to have chosen a 
text from among them ; but it so happens that 
while some of them seem to decide the matter in 



42 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

one way, others of them seem, with equal positive- 
ness, to decide it in a wholly different way. A 
hasty inference from this fact is that any attempt 
to find the truth must necessarily be hopeless, but 
the wise, and prudent, and right inference is simply 
this, that we are bound to settle our belief upon 
the point at issue, not by any one isolated verse, or 
by any two or three such verses, but by a careful 
and impartial survey of the whole field. To such 
a survey the text invites us to address ourselves ; 
we could not have a better one. 

" What shall the end be of them that obey not 
the gospel of God ? " 

When I said that this question admitted of no 
fewer than six different answers, I did not mean 
that all the possible answers were such as Chris- 
tian believers might give, and remain Christian 
believers after giving them, for such a statement 
would not be true ; but I meant that looking at 
the matter in a purely speculative way, as one 
might look at a problem in philosophy, six an- 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 43 

swers were conceivable. These answers group 
themselves under three heads corresponding to 
three forms of belief about the nature of the soul, 
which are, first, (1.) that the soul is mortal and per- 
ishes with the body, never to be revived again ; 
secondly, (2.) that the soul is necessarily immortal, 
and cannot die, but must under any circumstances 
continue to exist forever; and, thirdly, (3.) that the 
soul, though subject to death in consequence of 
sin, may by the grace and gift of God become im- 
mortal and live forever. More briefly, we may 
characterize these forms of belief as pointing re- 
spectively to the mortality, the necessary immor- 
tality, and the conditional immortality of the soul. 
Now, it is evident that every one of the possible 
answers to the question of our text, " What shall 
the end be of them that obey not the gospel of 
God?" must come under one or other of these 
beliefs about the nature of the soul. To the man 
who holds that the soul is mortal and perishes 
when the body does, of course only a single an- 



44 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

swer is possible. One event, he replies, happeneth 
to all, and the end of those who obey not the Gos- 
pel is the same as the end of those who do obey 
it. Good and bad, they lie down in the grave and 
perish with the same destruction. In the spirit of 
this belief," or perhaps pretended belief, the French 
wrote over the gateways of their graveyards during 
the first Revolution, " Death is an eternal sleep." 

Under the second of the forms of belief men- 
tioned, namely, that of the necessary immortality 
of all souls, whatever their attitude toward God, 
there is room for four answers to the question of 
the text. It may be said of the souls of the 
wicked, that when liberated from the bondage of 
the body and its lusts they are lifted at once into 
purity and blessedness. A belief of this sort has 
sometimes been built upon a misconception of St. 
Paul's words, " He that is dead is freed from sin." 

Or, secondly, it may be believed that the souls 
of the wicked at death enter upon a period of dis- 
cipline and purgation more or less prolonged, at 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 45 

the end of which time they are restored to God's 
favor, and enjoy, for ever after, a life of blessedness 
and peace. This is the opinion popularly known 
as Restorationism. 

Or, thirdly, it may be believed that in the future 
life, and throughout eternity, there will be the 
same mingled experience for souls which we wit- 
ness and share here and now — spiritual growth 
and spiritual decline, moral advance and moral re- 
treat, blessedness and misery, victory and failure, 
running on to all eternity in an order of succes- 
sion such as none but God can foresee. 

Or, fourthly, it may be believed that the souls 
of the lost are tormented with a punishment 
which never ceases, that they live on for ever and 
ever, the victims of an anguish to which nothing 
puts or can put an end. Belief in the neces- 
sary immortality of the soul makes supposable, 
then, any one of these four different destinies for 
the wicked: immediate and entire release, tem- 
porary punishment to be followed by final restora- 



46 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

tion to favor, a continual alternation of happiness 
and wretchedness, according to the life that is 
lived, and a never-ending suffering. 

To those, again, who hold the last of the three 
opinions with regard the nature of the soul, name- 
ly, that the soul is not necessarily, but only condi- 
tionally immortal, two forms of belief are open, 
first : that only such as are " accounted worthy to 
obtain that world, and the resurrection of the dead," 
will survive the grave at all, all other souls perish- 
ing with the bodies that have clothed them here (a 
view which, so far as the destiny of the wicked is 
concerned, is" identical with that which denies any 
future life at all, and therefore need not be counted 
as a separate answer to the question of our text), or, 
secondly, that although all will survive the grave, 
and be judged for the deeds done in the body, only 
a portion of those so surviving will inherit an end- 
less life, the rest, through failure to obtain that life, 
lapsing finally into literal, complete, and lasting 
death — non-existence. 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 47 

We see, then, that there are thus six possible 
answers to the question, What shall the end be 
of them that obey not the Gospel of God ? Be 
patient, for a moment, while I recapitulate them : 
first, (1.) extinction of being at the moment of 
death ; second, (2.) immediate admission to a state 
of pardon and blessedness at the moment of 
death ; third, (3.) restoration after a season of 
punishment ; fourth, (4.) alternation of happiness 
and unhappiness, according to conduct, as we 
have it here in this present world ; fifth, (5.) never- 
ceasing torment ; sixth, (6.) final extinction after 
a period of punishment that shall have been ac- 
curately apportioned to the sinner's deserts. 

Of these six possible answers, two may be ruled 
out at once, as never having received enough re- 
cognition from serious-minded Christian thinkers 
to make it worth while to consider them. No 
reputable following has ever been secured among 
Christian believers, either for the opinion that 
the souls of the wicked perish with their bodies, 



48 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

or for the opinion that all souls are admitted to 
immediate blessedness at the moment of death. 

There remain the four, two of which have 
so much in common that we may class them to- 
gether under the descriptive phrase, " a fresh 
chance for the soul in the future life/' while the 
other two, though agreeing in the point that hu- 
man probation, or a man's opportunity, ends with 
this life, are yet wide apart as to the character of 
the penalty ; the one making it a never-ending 
death in life, while the other sees it to be the final 
loss of all life whatsoever. 

Practically, then, we have reduced our possible 
conclusions from six to three, and the doctrines we 
shall have to consider in the course of our inquiry 
will be these : The doctrine of never-ending tor- 
ment ; the doctrine of restoration ; and the doc- 
trine of conditional immortality. 

The method of treatment which I have to sug- 
gest differs somewhat from that usually followed 
in such cases. What I would propose is, that in- 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 49 

stead of choosing out one of the three positions, 
and trying to see how much can be done to dis- 
credit the other two, we make it our endeavor to 
ascertain what are the strongest arguments in 
favor of each, before pronouncing for any. No 
doctrine of religion that has at any time com- 
manded the allegiance of large numbers of devout 
and studious minds can possibly be -unworthy 
of our thoughtful attention. There must be some 
grain of truth, even though it be but a grain, in 
any form of belief which has made out to secure 
a foothold in the Church of Christ. It is simply 
matter of record that illustrious names of men, ac- 
counted defenders of the faith, stand associated 
with each of these three opinions as to the destiny 
of " them that obey not the Gospel of God." I do 
not say that these names are equally distributed 
into three portions. I do not assert that as many 
authorities can be cited as witnesses in favor of one 
opinion as can be marshalled in support of another. 
I merely affirm that each has had its defenders, its 
3 



50 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

learned defenders, its devout defenders, and that 
for this reason, if for no other, each would be de- 
serving of our patient, fair, and attentive study. 

Even supposing that our minds are made up in 
advance, and are not likely to be changed, it can 
at least do us no harm to consider what there may 
be to be said in favor of conclusions different from 
our own. It only strengthens our confidence in 
the rightness of our own judgments, if, after listen- 
ing with open mind to all that can be urged on the 
other side, we find ourselves still rooted and 
grounded in the conviction with which we set out. 

Moreover, it very often happens that in examin- 
ing with fairness an opinion which we are predis- 
posed to reject, we find that although we must 
continue to reject it as a whole, there are yet fea- 
tures of it which we can with advantage engraft 
upon our old belief. A visit to your neighbor's 
house, and careful observation of its plan and 
furnishing, may not lead you to wish to exchange 
your home for his; but it is very likely that after 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 5 I 

your return, the recollection of what you have seen 
will bring about some slight modification of things 
as they were ; there w r ill be a little alteration 
here, or a trifling adjustment there, even though 
there be no general overturning or rebuilding. 
Domestic and doctrinal architecture have much 
in common, and in building a house of beliefs for 
the soul to dwell in, we shall do well to study the 
good features of more than one plan. So that 
our foundation be that other than which no man 
can lay, even Jesus Christ, we may safely trust 
Him who built all things to correct, sooner or 
later, in His own way, our errors of construction. 
But before entering upon this impartial, or, as 
nearly as possible impartial, setting forth of what- 
ever most makes in favor of each of the three lead- 
ing doctrines of retribution, there would seem to 
be no reason why I should not outline in advance 
the conclusion to which it will be my endeavor to 
lead you. I have no desire, under cover of stating 
all views fairly, to conceal my own belief, or to 



52 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

gain a cheap reputation for impartiality by waiv- 
ing the main point. St. Paul lays down the right 
way for ministers of the Gospel of Christ when he 
says, " by manifestation of the truth, commending 
ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of 
God. " The conclusion, then, to which I antici- 
pate that our inquiry will lead us is this, namely, 
that the precise character of the penalty in another 
life of unforgiven sin committed here it has not 
pleased God to reveal, although enough is told us 
to make it clear that retribution for guilt, whether 
in point of duration it be limited or unlimited, is a 
thing terribly real, and a thing more to be dreaded 
than anything that happens to us in the earthly 
life. If this conclusion be sound, why then it must 
follow further that individual Christians should be 
left at liberty to form judgments, each for himself 
and according to the best light he can command, 
as to the comparative likelihood of one opinion 
being the true one rather than another. 

But here, also, that is to say, in this matter of 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 53 

comparative likelihood, Christian people have, as it 
seems to me, a right to know their minister's mind, • 
have a right to such guidance as he may have it in 
his power to give, be it better or worse. 

I shall, therefore, not hesitate, in setting forth 
the three prominent doctrines that have been 
named, to arrange them in the order of what ap- 
pears to me their comparative probability, treat- 
ing first that which we will call the least likely ; 
then the less likely, and, last, the likely one of the 
three. I do not think that this method need at all 
interfere with an honest endeavor to state the 
argument in behalf of each as strongly as it can be 
stated, both on grounds of reason and of Scripture. 
That all this must be done under what have al- 
ready been referred to as the necessary limitations 
of pulpit-teaching, is not really so great a misfor- 
tune as might be imagined. We shall be keeping 
strictly within these limitations so long as we cling 
to plain English speech such as all men use, and 
hold the discussion anchored to that one book 



54 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

which all Christians know, or ought to know. I 
say we have no need to chafe under these limi- 
tations, for it can scarcely be that God permits 
peace of min'd in connection with such questions 
to be attainable only through a knowledge of the 
niceties of theological discussion, and an acquaint- 
ance with the unfrequented by-paths of historical 
research. If there be any point upon which a 
man feels that he cannot settle his mind until he 
knows all that the most advanced students in the 
various departments of critical inquiry have to tell, 
let him be sure that that particular point is one 
about which he can continue in doubt with entire 
safety to his soul. This is a matter in which the 
ministry might advantageously learn something 
from the bar. No lawyer dreams of arguing a 
case before a jury in the same way in which he 
expects to argue it, if it shall happen to be carried 
up by appeal to the supreme bench. The style 
of the language, and the character of the rea- 
soning, will, both of them, be different. And yet, 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 55 

the arguments used before the jury may be, in their 
way, as good and as conclusive as those used be- 
fore the bench. At least, if the case be one which 
the advocate would not dare to defend in the face 
of the judges, he ought not be willing to under- 
take the defence of it before the jurymen. 

And just so is it in questions of religion upon 
which an almost infinite amount of scholarship 
has spent itself. The refinements of the divinity 
school are out of place in the parish church ; 
and the attempts so often made to naturalize them 
there would be ludicrous, but for their harmful- 
ness. The preacher, like the advocate, ought 
to be ashamed to argue plausibly for a point 
which he would not venture to maintain before 
the tribunal of scholarship ; but to make his case 
with the congregation hinge upon points which 
only the tribunal of scholarship can possibly de- 
cide is a thing manifestly absurd. The parallel 
involves no disrespect either to congregations, on 
the one hand, or to scholars on the other. It is 



56 POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 

simply a calling of things by their right names. A 
pulpit is one thing, a professor's chair is another, 
and the essayist's desk is still a third. 

What is the message of God to man, and how 
may man be persuaded to attend to it, and obey 
it ? That is what concerns the Christian pulpit, 
and the only excuse which I, standing in a pulpit, 
can plead for treating such a subject as this even 
in such a simple way as that in which I have un- 
dertaken to treat it, is the fact that mental distress 
and perplexity with reference to the doctrine of 
future punishment are to-day keeping many souls 
from listening to the message brought by the Son 
from the Father to the children. 

Not merely to indulge a taste for speculative 
discussion, not to amuse or to divert minds that 
are well content to hear about religion, so long as 
the claims of religion are not driven home upon 
the conscience — not for any such purpose at all, but 
in order to lift the cloud, if possible, from before 
eyes that ache with long searching for the truth, 



POSSIBLE FORMS OF PENALTY. 57 

# 

and through tangled thickets of prejudice to clear 
the way of the Lord to the door of the heart, I have 
invited you to enter with me upon this enquiry. 

Accordingly, you will not be appealed to to 
decide between the rival claims of the School of 
Alexandria and the School of Antioch, nor shall 
we find it necessary to determine how far the 
eschatology of the Hebrew Church exhibited the 
results of Zoroastrian influence after the return 
from the Captivity. All topics of this sort will 
quietly be left untouched. 

Nature, that every-day Nature from which Jesus 
of Nazareth was content to draw his parables ; 
Scripture, that only Scripture in which we find 
assurance of eternal life ; and reason, that kingly 
gift, with which God endowed us that we might 
the better interpret both Nature and Scripture — 
these shall furnish us with the materials of thought. 

May the spirit of truth so guide us in our use of 
each one of the three that we may be led into all 
the truth God thinks it best that we should know ! 

3* 



IV. 



The Hypothesis of Everlasting Torment. 

i. Peter i : 17. 

. What shall the end be of them that obey not the Gos- 
pel of God ? 

Matt, xxv : 46. 

. these shall go away into everlasting punishment. 

We found, last Sunday, that while the question 
started by the former of these two texts might ad- 
mit of at least six different answers, there were 
really only three with which as Christian believers 
we had need seriously to concern ourselves, name- 
ly, these : the answer which says of the wicked, 
They shall be everlastingly tormented ; the answer 
which says They shall finally, after due discipline, 
be brought back to God ; and the answer which 
says, Because of their choosing death and reject- 
ing life, they shall perish — cease to be. 

58 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 59 

Without assuming, with regard to the merits of 
these various answers, an impartiality and indiffer- 
ence to which it would have been an hypocrisy 
to lay claim, I yet did not hesitate to promise 
that I would endeavor to state the argument for 
each of the three opinions at its best before sub- 
jecting it to criticism, either friendly or unfriendly, 
premising this much, however, that since some or- 
der of treatment must of necessity be observed, I 
should follow what seemed to me to be the order 
of comparative likelihood, beginning with the least 
likely, passing on to the less likely, and ending 
with the likely one of the three. This morning, 
therefore, I invite you, first of all, to consider what 
may be said in behalf of the belief that those who 
obey not the Gospel of God are to suffer pain 
everlastingly. Afterward, we will look at the 
reasons for accounting this to be, on the whole, 
the least likely of the several doctrines we have 
undertaken to weigh. 

The belief that any portion of the human race 



60 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

is destined to live on forever in ceaseless suffering 
rests upon the antecedent belief that man is im- 
mortal ; that we have within us a certain con- 
scious something called the soul, or, more ac- 
curately, the spirit, which cannot, or, at any rate, 
will not perish. This body that we wear may 
decay and cease to be, but the vital spark which 
animates it, " the soul that rises with us, our life- 
star/' is quenchless. In some state of conscious 
being, blessed or unblessed, happy or miserable, 
we are to continue to exist, all of us, " while end- 
less ages run." Such is the only supposition upon 
the basis of which any strong argument in behalf 
of everlasting torment can possibly be built up. 

That it is a supposition, and not a self-evident 
truth, all must admit; and, therefore, it follows 
that in any complete discussion of the question 
before us, this point that the soul is destined, in 
some condition or other, to endure forever, would 
have to be established before any further progress 
could be made. For our present purpose, how- 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 6 1 

ever, it will suffice if we concede the point, seeing 
that only so will it be possible to do what we have 
undertaken to do, namely, to set forth the argu- 
ment for the ceaseless suffering of the wicked at 
its best and strongest. 

The proper time to argue upon its merits the 
question of the perishable or imperishable nature 
of the soul will be when we take up the doctrine 
of conditional immortality, later on. 

Taking for granted, then, for the present, the 
alleged fact that the soul is certainly to exist for 
all eternity, let us draw the first reason for believing 
the doom of the wicked to be irreversible from the 
field of Nature. We find at work in Nature a prin- 
ciple of persistency. In plainer words, things have 
a disposition to move on in the groove to which 
they have become fitted. In mechanical philoso- 
phy, the first law of motion declares that any body 
moving in a straight line will continue to move in 
the same direction unless turned from its track by 
some other and stronger force than that which 



62 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

started it. The cannon-ball, to be sure, no mat- 
ter how heavy the charge that first propelled it 
from the gun, falls to the ground at last ; but 
why? Only because two opposing powers — the 
resistance of the air, and the attraction of the 
earth — have overmastered the original impulse. 
But for this interference on the part of other 
forces, the ball, so this law of motion requires us 
to believe, would have gone on indefinitely in the 
same direction in which it issued from the can- 
non's mouth. 

Transfer this principle from the material to the 
spiritual sphere, and what have we? — souls mov- 
ing on, after all interference from without has 
ceased, moving on in the same course to which 
they find themselves thoroughly committed. 

There is much in what we see in every-day life 
to justify a parable of this sort. Take the work- 
ings of that mysterious influence we call habit. If 
you fold a piece of paper in the same way for a 
great many times in succession, and then throw it 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. C$ 



carelessly down, it will not take some new shape, 
but will easily and naturally curl itself up accord- 
ing to the creases you have been making in it. 
It is apparently thus with the soul. Thoroughly 
wonted to any path or use, it will not quit that 
path or use unless it yield to some attraction, or 
obey some sudden wrench from a power acting 
upon it from the outside. 

Now, all that is necessary is to imagine an 
immortal soul, which has, by its own choice, be- 
come completely habituated to evil, launched 
upon a state of existence where no counter-attrac- 
tion exists, and you have, as a necessary conse- 
quence, everlasting torment ; for evil carries tor- 
ment in its own bosom, and the bad soul that can 
neither turn nor perish must be endlessly un- 
happy. It has been said that if man carries his 
free-will with him into another state of existence, 
it must be that he can at any time, if he chooses 
to do so, turn, and be reconciled to God. But 
what if it should prove that there is such a thing 



64 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

as a perpetually enslaved will — a will which under 
the dominion of sin has lost its character of free- 
dom and spontaneity, and become like a machine, 
which goes on repeating the same motions, and 
can originate no others ? A man's organs of 
speech are flexible and can utter words as they 
may happen to suggest themselves at the mo- 
ment, but the bit of indented foil in a phono- 
graph gives out the very same vibrations upon 
the one-thousandth turn of the cylinder that 
came from it at the first. Does the will of the 
habitual drunkard stand in the same attitude 
toward the appetite of thirst as that in which the 
will of the temperate man stands ? Is it, in any 
just sense of the words, a " free will "? No ; and 
those are words of fearful import in which Paul 
asks the Romans, " Know ye not that to whom ye 
yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye 
are to whom ye obey?" echoing as they do the 
plain declaration of our Lord, " Whosoever com- 
mitteth sin is the slave of sin." 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 6$ 

Now, we know that in this life that we are 
living here, the case of the man who has been 
overcome by the power of evil and brought into 
bondage to it is never wholly hopeless. But 
why? Because there is here continually going 
on, under the banner of God's good tidings, 
under the leadership of one named the Saviour, a 
war of emancipation. Efforts are making to res- 
cue slaves, to strike off their fetters, to set them 
on their feet as free men. But suppose all 
this healing, and helping, and restoring power 
withdrawn, and withdrawn forever, what is to 
hinder the coming into play of that law of per- 
sistency which will keep the lost soul moving 
perpetually upon that line which in the day of 
its freedom it deliberately chose; and which 
now, in the day of its thraldom, it is powerless 
to forsake ? To the conditions of our life pres- 
ent the sanguine words of Job apply: "There 
is hope of a tree if it be cut down that it 
will sprout again, and that the tender branch 



66 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

thereof will not cease ; " but what if it should 
turn out that, in the world to come, the sad pre- 
sage of Ecclesiastes is the one that rules, " if the 
tree fall toward the south or toward the north, 
in the place where the tree falleth there it shall 
be? " This is one argument in support of the belief 
that a lost soul will suffer everlastingly. It is an 
argument drawn from the nature of things, and 
some may say that being this, and only this, it 
can carry no great weight. That depends, of 
course, upon the degree of esteem in which one 
holds Nature as an interpreter of spiritual truth 
and a prophet of destiny. 

For myself I confess that if we are to concede 
an endless existence to all souls, this argument 
from persistency seems to me a cogent one. 

But let us turn from the book of hieroglyphics 
to the book of words, from the dumb symbol to 
the articulated message, from Nature to Scripture. 
What says the Lord Jesus Christ? and what say 
prophets before him and apostles after him ? To 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 67 

quote all the testimony of these witnesses is mani- 
festly beyond our power. Happily, there is no 
need of attempting to do so. The answer which 
our second text gives to the question of our 
first is confessedly the strongest that the Bible, 
as interpreted by the maintainers of this doctrine, 
affords. "What shall the end be of them that 
obey not the gospel of God?" asks the disciple. 
" These," replies the Master (and we have a 
perfect right to link the two utterances together, 
far apart as they actually stand in the New Tes- 
tament), " these shall go away into everlasting 
punishment." The argument hinges, of course, 
upon the meaning of the Greek word here render- 
ed in our English Version " everlasting," and in 
the very next clause " eternal " : " These shall go 
away into everlasting punishment, but the right- 
eous into life eternal." Mindful of the promise 
made last Sunday to avoid anything that might 
entangle us in the meshes of scholastic contro- 
versy, I shall not invite you either to trace the 



68 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

history of the adjective aiaovios (aionios), or to 
sit in judgment upon its precise position in the 
family of words. The statement of two or three 
unquestioned facts in connection with the word 
will suffice for our purpose. One of these facts 
is that in turning the New Testament into Eng- 
lish, the translators rendered this word in some 
twenty-five instances " everlasting/' and in some 
forty-two instances " eternal." 

Another fact is, that some scholars deny that 
either of these English words rightly gives us the 
meaning of the original, a portion of those who so 
deny alleging that the Greek ought to be rendered 
by some such expression as " age-long," as when 
we speak of the age-long periods of geology and 
astronomy ; and others of them preferring the in- 
terpretation followed by the translators of the 
Nicene Creed, where this word, as a reference to 
the Prayer Book will show, stands Englished thus, 
" of the world to come." You recall the sentence, 
" I look for the resurrection of the dead and the 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 69 

life of the world to come." Thus, if the word 
" aeonian," for which some modern writers have 
sought to secure a foothold in our language, were 
to become naturalized among us, we should receive 
the words of Christ sitting in judgment as follows: 
" These shall go away into aeonian punishment, 
but the righteous into aeonian life " — which might 
mean, according as we followed the one or the 
other of the interpretations I have mentioned, 
"These shall go away into an age-long punish- 
ment," or, " These shall go away into the punish- 
ment of the world to come," be that what it may 
be, many stripes or few. 

But to all reasoning of this sort, my friends, the 
believer in the everlasting wretchedness of the 
wicked has it in his power to reply, and to reply 
forcibly, as I think, Our finite minds at best can- 
not take in or appreciate the idea of endless dura- 
tion. Our only conception of eternity is that of a 
very, very long time, whether in connection with 
reward or punishment. Be, then, the right trans- 



70 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

lation of aiajviot (aionios) this or that, the fact re- 
mains that the sacred writers thought fit to apply 
this epithet to the Almighty Himself: they speak 
of the ^Eonian God. Endless it doubtless must 
mean when spoken of His being, and endless, there- 
fore, it may mean as applied to the doom of the 
wicked and the life of the good. 

Another argument worth taking into account is 
that which rests itself upon the tremendous im- 
agery employed by Jesus Christ in picturing the 
destiny of the disobedient — the fire that never can 
be quenched, the worm that dieth not. 

How, it may be fairly asked, could He to whom 
the consenting voice of all the centuries has accord- 
ed the title of the Merciful Saviour, how could He 
have used such symbolism, knowing as He must 
have known, the interpretation that might be put 
upon it ; how could He have employed such figures 
of speech, had He not intended that they should be 
understood, as for the most part they have been 
understood, namely, as predictive of an everlasting 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 7 1 

sorrow ? Again, how does it happen, not only that 
the public opinion of the Church has in the main 
inclined this way, but that so many individual 
Christians, eminent for piety and learning, men of 
the tenderest sensibilities and the keenest per- 
ceptions of right and wrong, have been, all these 
years, able to see this doctrine in the Bible, and 
yet able also to retain their confidence in that 
book as the Word of a just and compassionate 
God ? Why, even the sensitive and gentle Keble 
could write about a text which does not one half 
so readily as do many others lend itself to the 
sterner view : 

"Salted with fire, they seem to show 
How spirits lost in endless woe 
May undecaying live." 

These, then, I would submit as the strongest argu- 
ments known to me in favor of the opinion that 
the suffering to be visited upon men in punishment 
for their sins will be perpetual. We may call 
them, respectively, the argument from Nature, the 



J2 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

argument from Scripture, and the argument from 
History. That other arguments than these are 
sometimes brought foward, I am, of course, well 
aware. I have not developed them, simply because 
I thought that they would weaken rather than 
strengthen the case. There is, for instance, the 
argument that in many instances critics of high 
scholarship, who do not accept the Bible as the 
revealed Word of God, and who because they read 
it as they would read any other book, may be sup- 
posed to be the most impartial judges of what its 
words really do convey, affirm that everlasting 
torment is as a matter of fact the doctrine of 
Scripture. 

But this reasoning loses much more than half 
its force when it is remembered that of these crit- 
ics a portion consists of unbelievers, who became 
such because they thought the Gospel hopelessly 
committed to the obnoxious doctrine, while an- 
other portion is made up of men so bitterly hos- 
tile to Christ and his Church that an impartial 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 73 

judgment with respect to anything Christian is the 

^ °k very last thing to be expected from them. 

.1 i v Another feeble argument is that which with a 

k v parade of metaphysical acuteness asserts that sin, 

' ^ being an offence against an Infinite Being, merits 

J of necessity an infinite punishment, as plain a 

^ ^ begging of the question as possibly could be, and 

^ f\ easily met by the counter-assertion that because 
b : 
^ r the powers of endurance of a finite being are finite, 

* ^ he cannot conceivably support an infinite punish- 

s} V ment. When torture reaches a certain point hu- 

fg ^ manity succumbs ; the limit of tension is past. 

^ No ; this playing with the word " infinite " is easy, 

but it is dangerous sport for reasoners who care 
t 

anything for the stability of their reasoning. 

But dropping out of mind these feeble and 
inconclusive reasons, and remembering only the 
forceful ones, we have now to face the plain ques- 
tion, Are these things so ? Do these arguments 
really prove what they seem to prove ? To some 
the case may now appear so plain that they can 
4 



74 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

scarcely believe me to have been in earnest 
when I named this doctrine of the endlessness of 
the sufferings of the lost the least likely of the 
three possible beliefs. And yet in that opinion I 
remain, and that opinion I am prepared to defend. 

It is easier to pull down houses than to build 
them, and therefore fewer words will be needed 
to show the unsoundness of the arguments that 
have been exhibited than were essential to the fair 
statement of them. Besides, some of the reasons 
for not accepting these arguments as conclusive 
will naturally find a place in our study of the 
other possible beliefs. For the present, let a rapid 
criticism suffice. 

The first argument brought forward — that from 
persistency of habit — collapses the moment you 
withdraw from under it the supposition that the 
soul of man is necessarily immortal, incapable of 
extinction. There is, indeed, no reason to believe 
that an enslaved soul could to all eternity throw 
off unaided a habit that had once gained control. 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 75 

But suppose the enslaved soul finally perishes ; 
what then ? The arrow of Acestes fired into the 
air was burned up in the very rapidity of its flight. 
So long as it was an arrow, so long as it continued 
to exist, it was subject to and obeyed the first law 
of motion, but after it had been consumed there 
was nothing left that could move. So much for 
the argument from Nature. 

Equally short-lived is the argument from Scrip- 
ture after this foundation error of supposing that 
the Bible teaches the inevitable immortality of all 
souls has been once exploded. 

" These shall go away into everlasting punish- 
ment." Understand that to be, as it is, an ever- 
lasting punishment which forever cuts the soul off 
from happiness by cutting it off from life, and you 
will have no need to pare down the meaning of 
aidbvios (aionios). Take the epithet in its strong- 
est sense, and it is not at all too strong to express 
the truth. The full consideration of these points 
will, as I just said, more properly come in at a 



?6 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

later stage of our enquiry. I simply indicate them 
now as a suggestion of the sort of ground upon 
which one who holds everlasting torment to be 
the least likely of the three possible conjectures 
may securely stand. 

The argument drawn from the improbability of 
Christ's having used language so liable to be mis- 
understood, in case He really had not intended to 
teach an endless woe, is entitled to more serious 
attention. Taken along with the Church's gen- 
eral acceptance of the doctrine, and the acqui- 
escence of holy and devout and tender-hearted 
men in the same belief, it is indeed a powerful 
plea. 

And yet, unless we are prepared to accept as 
true the dogma of transubstantiation, to which, it 
must be admitted, the recorded words of Christ do 
give some color, as well as the doctrine of the 
Papal primacy, of which the same thing may be 
said — unless, I say, we are ready to receive these 
doctrines as true because the Church at large did 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. *JJ 

for centuries hold them with all but universal as- 
sent, we must allow that our Lord, knowing all 
things which should happen, may have purposely- 
used language upon this point which He foresaw 
might very possibly, for a season, be misunder- 
stood, with a view to the far-off day when a clearer 
light would dawn, and the true meaning of His 
word shine forth. May it not be that the very 
ambiguity of the words, their capability of various 
interpretations, was intended to serve a beneficent 
purpose? There was a long reach of time in the 
history of the Church, during which the belief gen- 
erally held with reference to eternal fire was that it 
would literally scorch and torture the actual flesh. 
We. need not to be too hasty in concluding that 
even this gross misinterpretation of Christ's words 
was a calamity. Who shall say that the rough peo- 
ples, the savage races to which the Gospel was then 
being carried, could in any other way have been 
made to feel the terrible reality of retribution in 
the world to come ; could any otherwise have been 



78 HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 

persuaded to look forward to that retribution as 
a thing to fear ? 

That these counter-arguments which have now 
been rapidly passed in review are absolutely con- 
clusive I do not claim ; but this much I may per- 
haps with safety say — that they are cogent to such 
a degree as to warrant any one whose moral sense 
revolts against the doctrine of endless suffering 
as the penalty for sins committed in this hand- 
breadth of time we call our life in classing this 
opinion, if he chooses so to do, as the " least 
likely " of the three constructions of which the 
language of the Bible has been thought capable. 

I do not believe that anybody who has listened 
carefully this morning will go away with the im- 
pression that my aim has been to prophesy smooth 
things. On the contrary, dear friends, the solemn 
conclusion to which meditations such as these 
ought to bring us all is this — the certainty and 
the awfulness of judgment. If we have seen 
reason to question the endlessness of suffering in 



HYPOTHESIS OF EVERLASTING TORMENT. 79 

the future world, it has not been for the purpose 
of veiling the threatenings of the Most High, or 
of explaining away the doom pronounced on un- 
forsaken sin, but rather with a view to clearing 
the ground for a statement of the truth, which, 
by its reasonableness, as well as by its scriptural- 
ness, shall compel men to listen, as now for a 
long time they have stoutly refused to listen, to 
the warning words of Christ. 



V. 

The Hypothesis of Final Restoration. 

i. Peter iv : 17. 
. . . What shall the end be of them that obey not the 

gospel of God ? 

Psalm cxxxvi : 1. 

. . . His mercy endureth forever. 

This coupling together of two seemingly dis- 
connected sayings, of which the one does not even 
profess to be a direct answer to the other, really 
puts the case precisely as a thoughtful advocate 
of the doctrine of restoration would wish to have 
it put* Such an advocate usually prefaces what 
he has to say, with a protest against the practice of 
trying to settle great questions of belief off hand 
by a reference to single texts of Scripture. " At- 
tend," he says to his judges, " attend, I pray you, 
rather to the great ruling principles which pene- 
trate and sustain the whole structure of Revela- 

80 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 8 1 

tion. You interpret a constitution or a code in 
the light of its general tenor, its prevailing drift. 
You do not compel the entire instrument to bend 
itself into conformity with a single sentence here, 
or a single sentence there, which may appear to 
be at variance with the plain purport of the whole. 
Deal in a like largeness of spirit with the Word of 
God, and you will perceive beyond question that 
the Author of it is ' One who will Kave all men to 
be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the 
truth. ' ' In this temper I can easily picture to 
myself one who holds confidently to the belief 
that of all creature souls none will finally be lost, 
dismissing with an impatient wave of the hand 
the hostile texts with which his adversary's argu- 
ment bristles, and replying, in a tone almost of in- 
jured delicacy, " Hush ! spare me your proof-texts, 
and your trim little demonstrations of endless 
misery. Broader in their sweep than any menace 
you can quote are the grand words, l His mercy 

endureth forever. ' Ponder them, and be still. " 
4* 



82 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

Following the method agreed upon when we be- 
gan the present enquiry, I shall state this morning, 
as well as I can, the arguments that make in favor 
of the belief that all souls will finally be saved. 
This done, there will remain the duty of showing 
why, in the face of the utmost that can be said in 
its behalf, I should yet have ventured to class 
this opinion, not indeed as the least likely, but as 
only the less likely, of the three we have under- 
taken to examine. 

Let me remind you in advance that this doc- 
trine, like the one we considered last Sunday, rests 
upon the assumed truth of another and larger doc- 
trine still, namely, that of the inevitable immor- 
tality of all souls. An advocate of restoration- 
ism takes it for granted that every one of God's 
conscious and intelligent creatures is, as a matter 
of fact, destined to exist forever. Whether this 
assumption be a reasonable and proper one, I do 
not now dispute. We shall come to that point 
before we are done with our subject. For the 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 83 

present, I merely ask you to keep constantly in 
mind that in setting forth the argument of the 
restorationist, I am to speak as if I believed with 
him in the endless existence of every human crea- 
ture God ever has made, or ever will make. 

First, then, I ask you to look at the matter on 
the ground of what is intrinsically reasonable and 
in harmony with our common notions about the 
wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. Is it like- 
ly that a just God and a merciful would have 
created a race of intelligent immortals, endowed 
with a marvellous capacity for enjoyment and 
for suffering, if He foresaw, as He must have 
foreseen, that to some of them their immortali- 
ty would be one long, never-ending woe ? Look- 
ing at the Heavenly Father simply in His char- 
acter of artificer, as God the Maker, ought we 
not, are we not bound, to credit Him with bet- 
ter foresight in His workmanship? It is true 
that of the products of the potter's wheel some 
prove misshapen and worthless, and are thrown 



84 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

away ; but that is because the potter is not the 
perfect master of his craft. If he were the all- 
wise and all-powerful artist we credit our Maker 
with being, he would neither err in the choice of 
the clay nor blunder in the handling of it. En- 
dow the misshapen vase that has been thrown 
away with consciousness, and not only so, but 
with everlasting consciousness, and not only so, 
but with an everlasting consciousness of unutter- 
able shame and mortification, and then you begin 
to have a parallel to what it would be for a soul 
of God's own creating to find itself under the ban 
of His enduring wrath. Bitterest of all, in such a 
case, we may well believe, would be the stinging 
sense of a deep injustice. For only imagine the 
case of a lost soul, hopelessly lost. Let it be, if 
you will, a soul which, during the earthly life, 
enjoyed every possible opportunity of knowing 
and doing the right, but which persistently chose 
evil, and continually, throughout the full measure 
of three score and ten of unrepentant years, did 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 85 

wrong. Such cases of persistent wickedness are 
confessedly uncommon ; nevertheless, for the sake 
of making the caseas strong as strong can be, let 
it be such as I have stated. Now, imagine this 
condemned soul, after three score and ten, not of 
years, but of myriads of centuries of retribution, 
crying to God out of the depths, " Father, have 
mercy ! " and hearing in response only the words, 
" Too late ; the door is shut ! " 

Again, imagine three score and ten myriads of 
centuries passed by, and this same lost soul lifting 
up his voice once more and saying, " Oh God ! is 
it not enough ? Those were guilty years, I know, 
on that far-off earth where Thou didst place me ; 
they were guilty years, but they were short and 
few. It was an evil life, but Thou didst plant me 
in it. I chose it not. And now it looks so infi- 
nitely far away and so slight. Is not my punish- 
ment enough ?" Again the answer comes back 
unchanged, " Too late ; the door is shut ! " Now, 
my friends, this is not exaggerated language. On 



86 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

the contrary, it is language that falls far, far short 
of the fact, supposing the fact to be that souls 
which here on earth have sinned against light, and 
have gone out of life impenitent, are destined to 
endure for ceaseless ages the agonies of remorse. 
The only way in which we can begin to get a 
conception of what infinite duration means is 
by some such cumulative process as this. With 
what appalling flippancy do people allow them- 
selves to prate about infinity ! Eternal anguish ? 
The words fall glibly enough from the lips, but is 
there one of us, think you, who could be brought 
face to face with the actual thing and retain his 
reason ? No ; there are some sights which no man 
may look on and live. This is one of them. If 
the doctrine be true, it is true ; but cease then to 
talk about cheerfulness in religion, and let the 
Church's one psalm be henceforth " Miserere." 

To all this it may be and is replied by the 
believer in the doctrine of endless torment, that 
God's judgments are a great deep ; that His ways 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 87 

are past finding out, and that for us, His creatures, 
to criticise His wisdom or to challenge His justice 
is that presumptuous sin from which His true ser- 
vant must ever pray to be kept back. 

Let us weigh the merits of this rebuke. It may 
import either one of two things. It may mean 
that God's justice is different in kind from man's 
justice, and that therefore to discuss their com- 
parative merits must be as fruitless as an attempt 
to decide by debate whether blue or red be the 
more excellent color. Or, again, it may mean that 
since man's life on earth is part of a widely ex- 
tended and complicated scheme, of which we see 
only a small fraction, it is premature for us to 
say that any of God's dealings are unjust until we 
find ourselves in a position from which we can 
look down upon the whole thing, and view it in its 
entirety. Of these two possible interpretations 
which the rebuke may bear, the former is fatal to 
all religion, since if the divine justice be a thing 
unlike in kind to human justice, how are we to be 



88 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

sure that the divine mercy and the divine love are 
not also wholly unlike what we among ourselves 
consider mercy and love to be? In such a case 
we might indeed persist in raising altars to our 
unknown God, but the worshippers would be few. 

The other meaning of which the rebuke ad- 
mits is better worthy of our attention. What it 
amounts to is this — that we have no right to ques- 
tion the justice of God in condemning creatures of 
His own making to endless anguish, seeing that it 
must always be a presumptuous thing to blame 
the work of any builder before his fabric is com- 
plete. 

But is it always a presumptuous thing thus to 
sit in judgment on a half-finished work ? On the 
contrary, may it not sometimes be an absolutely 
necessary thing to do, whether we like doing it or 
not? Suppose I am compelled to decide whether 
I will or will not employ a certain architect, and 
the only specimen of his skill anywhere within 
reach of my observation is a building in process of 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 89 

erection, — am I presumptuous if I say I see cer- 
tain lines there which convince me that the man 
is one I cannot safely employ? I may be mis- 
taken. It is conceivable that, were the building 
finished, I might discern a meaning or a beauty in 
features that now strike me as faulty. I may be 
mistaken, I admit ; but am I presumptuous, seeing 
that the necessity is laid on me of deciding either 
one way or the other ? Now, it must be remem- 
bered that, looked at in a large way, the Chris- 
tian religion may be said to be standing at the 
bar of the judgment of mankind. We Americans 
have most of us been brought up within the limits 
of the Christian Church (understanding that ex- 
pression in the widest sense) ; but such is not the 
case with the greater number of our fellow-men. 
Of the thirteen hundred millions who make up the 
population of the globe at the present time, about 
four hundred millions, or a little less than one-third 
of the whole number, are reckoned by the compilers 
of statistics under the head of " Christians." To the 



go HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

remaining two-thirds of mankind the religion of 
the Gospel presents itself, when it presents itself 
at all, as a system to be judged on its merits. 
Moreover, we find even within the pale of nomi- 
nal Christendom immense multitudes of people of 
whom the same thing may be said, namely, that 
they are really looking at the Gospel from the 
outside, and from what they can see of it are 
making up their minds whether to accept it as 
having come from God, or-to reject it as one of the 
imaginations of men. 

Now, who shall wonder if thoughtful heathen 
(and such there are), or conscientious seekers after 
truth among the unbelieving portion of nominal 
Christendom (and such there are also) — who shall 
wonder if these persons, when informed that the 
doctrine of the endless sufferings of the wicked 
is a necessary part of the Gospel system, reply: 
"There is much, we confess, in this religion of the 
Christ that draws us ; so much, indeed, that we not 
only feel disposed to embrace it, but we are also 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 91 

willing to accept along with it, and on faith, many 
things the reasons for which we are unable to 
see ; but when it comes to a doctrine which wounds 
us most deeply in that very part of our nature 
where Christ is most welcome, which shocks the 
very feelings in us by virtue of which we were 
first attracted towards the cross, namely, our sense 
of justice and of pity, why then you provoke a 
reaction, you throw the overweight into the other 
scale, and your religion, from having seemed to 
be, when looked at as a whole, most likely to be 
true, has now come to seem, when looked at as a 
whole, most likely to be false. It is more proba- 
ble, in other words, that the Gospel, notwithstand- 
ing its many seemingly supernatural beauties, 
originated with man, than that, with this blotch 
upon it, it is the message of a merciful and right- 
eous God." 

This is a way of putting the argument for 
restorationism which, I must acknowledge, seems 
to me, always remembering that we have agreed 



92 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

to assume as certain the perpetual existence of 
all souls, a very forcible one. We pass now to 
reasoning of a different sort : 

In saying as I did when we began that ad- 
vocates of the doctrine of restoration were, as a 
rule, disinclined to argue the question upon pure- 
ly scriptural grounds, and by an appeal to texts, 
I did not mean to be understood as intimating 
that they could find nothing in the Bible to favor 
their opinion, for such a representation would be 
untrue. 

They have, in the first place, their urgent plea 
for a more careful and guarded interpretation of 
the Greek adjective rendered in our English Ver- 
sion by the word " eternal." Whether Ionian 
punishment be conceived of as age-long suffering, 
or simply as the retribution of "the world to 
come," in either case it is conceivable that, sooner 
or later, there may be an end. But we dwelt 
upon this point so fully last Sunday that it is 
needless to return to it. 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 93 

Next in importance to this argument about 
aicovios (aionios), or possibly even in advance of it, 
most restorationists would rank what they hold 
to be the plain revelation in the Scriptures of the 
final abolition of evil throughout all worlds, a 
consummation which would involve, of course, the 
conversion of all sinners. 

They admit, indeed, that there are sayings of 
our Lord and of His apostles which, taken in 
their plain, literal sense, make strongly against 
the expectation that any opportunity of choice 
other than that offered in this earthly life will 
ever be granted to man ; but these, they argue, 
are overruled by other sayings of a more compre- 
hensive character, which encourage us to hope. 

Especially do they take delight in those grand 
utterances which occur here and there in Scrip- 
ture with reference to a far-off restitution of all 
things, beginning with the promise to the patri- 
arch that in his seed should all the families of 
the earth be blessed, and coming down to that 



94 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

magnificent picture in the Revelation, where 
every creature which is in heaven, and on the 
earth, and under the earth, and such as are in 
the sea, and all that are in them, are represented 
as joining in the anthem, " Blessing and honor and 
glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon 
the throne and to the Lamb for ever and ever." 
This utter and permanent abolition of all evil, 
this burning up of death and hell, they declare to 
be the 

" one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 

Evidence in support of this hopeful belief they 
find in the words of our Lord Himself, when He 
says, " And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
[or, as one reading has it, all things] unto Me ; " 
in the words of St. Paul, when he says, "That 
in the dispensation of the fulness of times, He 
might gather together in one all things in Christ, 
both which are in heaven and which are on 
earth ; " in the words of St. Peter, when he says, 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 95 

" Whom the heaven must receive until the times 
of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken 
by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the 
world began ; " and in the words of St. John, 
when he says, "The former things are passed 
away . . . Behold, I make all things new." 
To what, it is urged, does all this joyous chorus 
of prediction point, if not to a time when, from 
one farthest corner of God's wide universe to the 
other, whatever lives shall be obedient to him? 
Apart from these general and comprehensive say- 
ings, which confessedly make the main strength 
of the restorationist's scriptural argument, there 
are also certain hints and suggestions scattered 
here and there through the New Testament upon 
which some dependence is placed ; as, for instance, 
the parable of the imprisoned debtor, where it is 
said that he shall not come out thence until he 
has paid the uttermost farthing, the word " until " 
seeming to point to a possible release from cap- 
tivity at last. Again, there is the saying about the 



g6 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

servant which knew not his Lord's will, and did 
commit things worthy of stripes ; he, it is affirmed, 
" shall be beaten with few stripes." This admission 
of the plea of ignorance of God's will as a ground 
of excuse is thought to open a wide door of hope. 

Christ's guarded reticence when asked, " Lord, 
are there few that be saved ? " is capable certainly 
of an interpretation which would harmonize with 
a belief in the final restoration of all souls. His 
lips, it may be, were sealed, lest, if the whole were 
told, some might too much presume upon God's 
goodness, and so postpone their own blessedness. 

These are some of the indirect testimonies of 
Scripture to restorationism, of which it is said that 
they are all the more precious and the more per- 
suasive for the very reason that they are indirect. 

There remains the witness of history. On this 
side it might seem, at first sight, as if the posi- 
tion of the restorationists were utterly defenceless. 
But no : in spite of the general prevalence, or, at 
least, general profession of a contrary belief during 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 97 

many centuries, there is room for something to be 
said for this doctrine, even from the side of Church 
history. The fact, for instance, that one of the 
most acute, most learned, and most devout of the 
early Fathers of the Church, the illustrious Origen 
of Alexandria, held this doctrine, and taught it, is 
a consideration not lightly to be set aside. But 
far more important than this private opinion of one 
learned doctor is to be reckoned the adoption by 
the Church at large of the doctrine about purga- 
tory, which, rising into prominence in the sixth 
century after Christ, gradually gained ground until 
it had become the accepted belief of Christen- 
dom, or at least of the whole Western portion of 
Christendom. By establishing this cleansing-place 
for the soul on the hither side of heaven, the 
Church did practically mitigate to a great degree 
the terror of its teaching about hell. 

" I constantly hold," says the Creed of Pope 
Pius IV., one of the leading doctrinal standards 
of the Roman Church — " I constantly hold that 
5 



98 HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 

there is a purgatory, and that the souls therein 
detained are helped by the suffrages of the faith- 
ful/' Another belief prevalent among Roman 
Catholics, though I am not aware that it has ever 
been elevated to the rank of dogma, is that there 
is such a thing as " invincible ignorance/' a state 
of mind, that is to say, so darkened through lack 
of opportunity to know the truth that the Almighty 
Judge will not doom the subject of it to that eter- 
nal fire which, had he sinned knowingly, he would 
have deserved. These two doctrines, that of 
purgatory and that of invincible ignorance, taken 
in connection, must have saved sensitive hearts 
many a pang. In fact, they do of themselves 
constitute a sort of doctrine of restoration, for 
most if not for all souls ; and they, therefore, by 
their very existence, greatly weaken the force of 
all arguments for the endlessness of torment that 
depend for their validity on the alleged general 
consent of the Church. 
These, then, are the main defensive positions of 



HYPOTHESIS OF FINAL RESTORATION. 99 

those who believe in the limited duration of fu- 
ture punishment : first, the inherent reasonable- 
ness of the thing judged by what we know of the 
Heavenly Father's character ; second, the prophetic 
testimony of Scripture to some final, even though 
far-off, restitution of all things, in which evil of 
every sort shall be swallowed up and lost ; and, 
thirdly, the fact that the prevailing opinion of the 
Christian Church during the greater part of its ex- 
istence, though nominally on the side of the end- 
lessness of suffering, has really, by dint of the door 
of escape furnished by the doctrine of purgatory, 
been a modified form of restorationism. 

Here we leave the subject for the present. 

Next Sunday it will be my endeavor to show 
that the reasons in favor of a belief, widely differ- 
ent from either of the two we have thus far ex- 
amined, are strong enough to justify us in de- 
claring it to be the one which has most evidence 
in its support, and which may, therefore, fairly be 
called the likely opinion of the three. 



VI. 

The Hypothesis of Conditional Immortality. 

i. Peter iv : 17. 
. . . What shall the end be of them that obey not the 
Gospel of God ? 

Psalm xcii : 7. 
. . . That they shall be destroyed forever. 

We are to weigh this morning the doctrine of 
Conditional Immortality. In the progress of our 
enquiry we have seen that the belief in the endless 
suffering of the lost soul, and the belief in the final 
restoration to God's favor of all souls, are built, 
both of them, upon the assumed truth of the doc- 
trine that every child of man, be his attitude to- 
ward his Maker what it may, is destined to an 
existence that shall never cease. Thus far, out of 

a sincere desire to judge each of the several beliefs 

100 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. IOI 

at its best, we have allowed this assumption to 
pass without serious challenge ; but the time has 
come to face the plain question, Do the Scrip- 
tures teach that all men, without exception, are to 
retain conscious being everlastingly? 

Let us be very careful that we understand just 
what the point at issue is. That all men are to 
survive the grave and to be judged according to 
the deeds done in the body is conceded. This 
disposes of the common cavil that the doctrine of 
conditional immortality sentences the larger part 
of the human race to die the death of the brute. 
It might indeed be questioned, upon grounds of 
reason, whether a thoroughly imbruted nature 
could fairly complain if it found itself left to share 
the heritage of the creatures with which it had 
cast in its lot while living ; but that is aside from 
the purpose. We are not looking at the matter 
now from the view-point of reason ; we are treading 
in the paths of revelation, and asking, " What saith 
the Scripture ?" and that the Scripture does say 



102 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

that all souls shall be summoned to answer for 
themselves at the bar of judgment is clear. 

But is it equally clear from Scripture that after 
the judgment is past an endless existence is to 
await those who, in the phrase of Paul and Barna- 
bas, have judged themselves " unworthy of ever- 
lasting life " ? 

That is the very thing we are to consider ; and 
assuredly it is well worth considering. No graver 
question could possibly occupy our thoughts. 

When we remember that a single word would 
suffice to settle the point in the affirmative, it is 
startling, to say the least, to find that that word 
has not been spoken. Search the Scriptures 
through and through, my friends, and point, if you 
can, to a single sentence in which it is directly as- 
serted that man is a being who will inevitably 
exist forever. Strong statements to the effect 
that man is naturally mortal are strewn with mel- 
ancholy frequency over those pages, but nowhere 
is he declared to be immortal apart from the 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 103 

quickening power of Him who only hath immor- 
tality to give. 

In reply to this it is sometimes argued that the 
immortality of the soul is a truth so generally ac- 
cepted that any direct statement of it in Holy 
Scripture was unnecessary ; and a parallel to this 
'silence is thought to have been found in the 
fact that none of the sacred writers have felt 
obliged explicitly to state the proposition, There 
is a God. 

But notice the wide difference between these 
two cases. The existence of a God, even if it be 
not distinctly asserted, is yet on almost every 
page of Scripture as plainly implied as it pos- 
sibly can be. Everywhere the Almighty con- 
fronts us. Take His name and presence out of the 
Bible, and the book shrivels into nothingness in 
a moment. Can any such thing be said of the 
doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul? 
Where is it taken for granted? In what single 
sentence is it necessarily implied ? Which stone in 



104 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

the wide arch of revelation is loosened when the 
doctrine falls ? Grant me, for the moment, that 
eternal life in the sense of endless existence is 
really the gift of God to those who seek it, and 
not the inherent right of all men, whether they 
seek or not — grant it, I say, for the moment, and 
then ask yourself, is there a single saying of the 
Scriptures which such a supposition would inval- 
idate or make meaningless ? On the other hand, 
are there not hundreds of sentences which it 
would fill with sudden light? 

In looking to see what the Bible has to tell 
about the mortal or immortal nature of man, we in- 
stinctively turn first to the primitive tradition em- 
bodied in the Book of Genesis. The interpretation 
of that tradition, uncertain as we must always be 
how far we are dealing with the language of alle- 
gory, and how far with a statement of literal fact, 
is confessedly beset with difficulty. But, letting 
go all secondary considerations which do not touch 
the essence of the thing, what are the main points 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 105 

in the narrative of the temptation and the fall ? 
Are they not these? Man, as represented by- 
Adam and Eve, is put upon the trial of his obedi- 
ence. He is forbidden to eat, not of the tree of 
life, which evidently is free to him, but of the tree 
of the knowledge of good and evil. Precisely 
what eating of the tree of the knowledge of good 
and evil may have meant we cannot certainly 
know. Various conjectures are possible. But 
this much of inference from the story is plain, 
namely, that before disobedience man had an op- 
portunity of endless life, which after disobedience 
was taken away. " And now," the Lord God 
says, " lest he put forth his hand and take also of 
the tree of life and eat and live forever " — therefore 
He drove him out.* Thus, at the very outset of 
our study of Scripture, we find death put forth 

* From the way in which many interpreters deal with this pas- 
sage it would seem as if they were oblivious to the fact that 
the words "Ye shall not surely die" came from the lips of the 
Tempter, not from the mouth of the Lord God. 

5* 



106 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

as the penalty of setting at naught the will of 
God. But what sort of death? For all that ap- 
pears to the contrary, total death — the death of 
the whole man. Nothing is said about any distinc- 
tion between body and soul. It was not declared 
" In the day that thou eatest thereof thy body 
shall become mortal ; " but the warning ran, " In 
the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely 
die." The first man's only experience of death 
being such as was derived from the world of Na- 
ture around him, it is hard to conceive how this 
sentence could have meant to his mind anything 
else than the utter loss of being. The insect that 
perished before his eyes went to decay, and evi- 
dently was no more ; the withered leaf fell at his 
feet and mouldered away ; what other purport, 
then, than final extinction could have been car- 
ried to Adam's mind by the word addressed to 
him, " Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt 
return ?" If it be urged that because there had 
been imprinted upon Adam at his creation the 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. IO7 

image of his Maker therefore he could not die, it 
is enough to answer that the dewdrop shows the 
image of the sun only so long as it quivers uncon- 
sumed ; presently the burning heat scorches the 
drop into vapor, and the image flies. Indeed, it 
seems to be of the very nature of images that they 
should be perishable unless care is taken to keep 
them in existence. The image on the sensitive 
plate of the photographer will prove as transient as 
it is beautiful if it be not presently plunged in the 
" fixing-bath " which gives it permanence. Man, 
made to reflect the image of Him that created 
him, ceased perfectly to do so the moment the 
cloud of selfishness came between him and the sun. 

But we must not let ourselves become entangled 
in figures of speech. Be it our endeavor to cling as 
closely as possible to the plain letter of the Word 
of God. 

Simultaneously with the' death-sentence passed 
on man, which we are to think of as beginning 
immediately to take effect (just as we say, and 



108 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

say truly, of ourselves that the moment we are 
born we begin to die), simultaneously with this 
death-sentence comes a glimpse, only a glimpse, 
of a gracious purpose on God's part to set in 
motion a remedial process. The seed of the 
woman, it is promised, shall bruise the serpent's 
head. How the hope thus suggested strengthens 
and deepens, how in each successive stage of the 
world's progress the prophecy gains in distinct- 
ness, it is needless to show ; enough to say that at 
the last comes One who asserts Himself to be the 
Messiah, for whom all the generations have been 
waiting. And what is the burden of His message 
now that He is come? What are the words in 
which He defines the purpose of His taking flesh? 
" I am come," He says — " I am come that ye might 
have life. ,, Thus he establishes Himself a second 
Adam, bringing back to man that tree of life from 
access to which his self-will shut the first Adam 
out : " For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ 
shall all be made alive." Contenting ourselves with 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 1 09 

this merest suggestion of a magnificent thought 
which gives coherence and symmetry to the 
whole Bible, let us go on to look at the language 
in which the Scripture writers, when appealing to 
us in a practical way, put the matter of choice. 
What are the alternatives of destiny as Christ and 
His apostles picture them ? Sometimes the con- 
trast is imaged to us under the form of a dividing 
path : there is a road that leads to the right, and a 
road. that leads to the left ; there is a narrow way, 
and a broad. Again, the difference is illustrated 
from the relations of social life : the better choice 
is likened to freedom, the worse to slavery. Yet, 
again, the natural world is laid under contribu- 
tion, and light and darkness are made the sym- 
bols of the wise choice and the foolish. But 
standing out against this faint background of 
parable and similitude, as if written in letters of 
flame, shine the two words, LIFE and DEATH. This 
is the real contrast. These are the two tremen- 
dous alternatives between which, according to the 



110 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

teaching of Jesus Christ, the will of man must de- 
cide. Is the narrow way to be sought? It is not 
because it is narrow, but because it leads to 
life. Is the broad way to be shunned ? It is not 
because it is broad, but because it leadeth to de- 
struction. To those whose spirits languish with 
thirst Christ promises a well of water that shall 
spring up into everlasting life. To hungry souls 
He says, " If any man eat of this bread, he shall 
live forever ;" while with those who persist in 
turning their backs upon his Gospel, the sad ex- 
postulation is, " Ye will not come unto me that ye 
might have Hie." We are assured that in these say- 
ings, and in sayings with these, our Saviour does 
not mean life, but blessedness, and that the con- 
trasted thing he has in mind is not death, real 
death, extinction of being, but a life of anguish. 

And yet, why should we twist His words after 
such a fashion ? 

The maintainers of the doctrine of conditional 
immortality argue and very convincingly, I think, 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. Ill 

that all this strong language about life and death 
as being the two final destinies between which 
men must choose, ought to be taken to mean just 
what it seems to mean, unless some good and suf- 
ficient reason can be given for not so understand- 
ing it. What good and sufficient reason is there? 
They do not deny that the word " death " can be, 
and sometimes is, figuratively used to describe a 
sort of existence which, though poor and contemp- 
tible, is, nevertheless, in some sense existence still, 
as when, for instance, St. Paul speaks of the 
woman who liveth in pleasure as being "dead 
while she liveth," or, again, when he speaks of 
people who are still moving and breathing as 
being " dead in trespasses and sins." This they 
admit ; but they affirm that in all such cases there 
is something to make it evident that the speaker 
or writer is using his word figuratively, and not 
literally. But take such a declaration as this, also 
from the lips of St. Paul, "If ye live after the 
flesh, ye shall die." Here the dying is put into the 



112 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

future and made a penalty — ye shall die. If it had 
been intended to be understood in the figurative 
sense of being dead in trespasses and sins, it ought, 
of course, to have read, " If ye live after the flesh, 
ye are dead, for living after the flesh is death in 
the figurative sense : " but no ; the words run, " If ye 
live after the flesh, ye shall die." It would seem 
to be hard for an unbiassed mind to see in such 
language as this anything less than a threatening 
of death to the whole man as the final punishment 
for a sensual life. Were I to marshal before you 
all the passages of the Bible in which this contrast 
is set forth, it would consume what little time we 
have at our command. A single sentence, there- 
fore, from the lips of Moses, shall represent all that 
might be quoted from the Old Testament, and a 
single sentence from the lips of Paul all that might 
be quoted from the New. " See," says the patri- 
arch to his people, " I have set before thee this 
day life and good, and death and evil." " The 
wages of sin," says the apostle to his converts, 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. II3 

"is death; but the gift of God is eternal life 
through Jesus Christ our Lord." 

We pass to another line of argument, that 
which starts from the language in which our Lord 
and His apostles describe under the form of sym- 
bols the character of future punishment. That 
this language means something terribly real, what- 
ever that something may be, no one who trusts 
implicitly the truthfulness of Christ ought to 
doubt. If He is not to be believed when He 
speaks to us about the terrors of retribution, why, 
then let His whole religion go; for if here He is 
untrustworthy, He must be untrustworthy through- 
out. To discredit what He says of hell is in the 
same breath to discredit what He says of heaven, 
and if into those regions of the future we refuse 
to follow Him, why should we think Him other 
than a blind guide when He speaks to us of God 
and the soul? It is plain, then, that the integ- 
rity of the Christian religion is bound up with 
the truth of what Christ teaches about penalty — 



114 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

not the literalness, of course, but the truth of it. 
What now does He teach? That is the question 
at issue. He teaches in plainest words that the 
wicked are sentenced to unquenchable fire. This, 
of course, is symbolic language. We must inter- 
pret it according to the rules that govern the in- 
terpretation of all symbolism. What common fire, 
such as we know it, does for visible things, such as 
we know them, that eternal fire must do for souls. 
But what is the common operation of fire upon 
the things submitted to its action? It certainly is 
not preservative, but the opposite. The function 
of fire is to destroy. " Gather ye together first the 
tares and bind them in bundles to burn them." 
" He shall burn up the chaff with unquenchable 
fire." " If any man build upon this foundation 
. . . wood, hay, stubble . . . the fire shall 
try every man's work of what sort it is." Is 
it natural or even possible to think of the tares, 
the chaff, the wood and hay and stubble of these 
illustrations, as continuing in existence after they 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 1 1 5 

have been submitted to such a process as the 
words describe ? Of course not. No more, then, is 
it natural to think of the lost soul as forever resist- 
ing the flame that never can be quenched. To all 
eternity our God must be what He is now, "a 
consuming fire ; " but it is by a fallacious reasoning 
process that we transfer the eternity from the 
consumer to the consumed. " Fear Him," Christ 
says, " which is able to destroy both soul and body 
in hell. ,, If it be urged that it is contrary to 
God's method in Nature utterly to destroy any 
substance, and that the action of fire on matter is 
simply to change the form of it, not to put out of 
existence the elements of which it is composed, 
the answer is ready. Fire does not indeed destroy 
elementary substance, but it does destroy what we 
call individuality. A ship at sea, for instance, is 
struck by lightning and burned. Masts, spars, rig- 
ging, deck, and hull are successively overmastered 
by the flame and disappear. Shall any one tell us 
that because the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and 



Il6 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

other elements which composed the material of 
the ship are still in existence, therefore the ship 
has not been destroyed ?, To say so is merely to 
trifle with words. Plainly the ship, as a ship, is 
gone forever. Its personality, if I may so speak, 
is lost. 

But, passing this point, there remains the ques- 
tion, What are we to make of the very expression 
itself, " everlasting punishment'' ? With what pro- 
priety can the utter destruction of the condemned 
be called their " everlasting " punishment ? 

In order to reply intelligently, we must ponder 
a distinction which is as familiar to jurists as it 
is to theologians : the distinction between punish- 
ments of pain and punishments of loss. The rod 
and the lash are of the first sort ; fines and con- 
fiscations of property are of the second. Now, 
there is one thing that men value more than money 
or houses or lands, and that one most precious 
possession is life. When, therefore, a penalty is 
to be provided for the very worst of crimes it is 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 117 

possible to commit, earthly legislators find that 
penalty in loss of life. We do not, it is true, call 
capital punishment " everlasting " punishment ; 
but the reason why we do not call it so is because 
the life that is taken away by the executioner is 
one that would only last for a few short years at 
most, were it to be spared. But suppose the life 
taken away to be an endless one : have we not 
then a punishment of loss, which, without any 
straining of language, may well be called an ever- 
lasting one ? 

Of Sodom and Gomorrah an apostle says that 
they suffered " the vengeance of eternal fire." We 
do not deny that their punishment is an everlast- 
ing punishment, because as cities they have ceased 
to be. Why then should we doubt that those are 
punished everlastingly of whom it is said in our 
text that they are destroyed forever? 

Thus we see how, even without resorting to the 
demand that a Greek adjective shall be retrans- 
lated, and " eternal " made to mean something dif- 



1 1 8 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

ferent from what it has commonly been supposed 
to mean, it is perfectly possible for the believer in 
conditional immortality to accept as literally true 
the terrible words, " These shall go away into ever- 
lasting punishment. ,, * 

That the arguments which have now been brief- 
ly and imperfectly presented prove the doctrine 
of conditional immortality to be, beyond the 
shadow of a doubt, the teaching of Holy Scrip- 
ture, I am not prepared to say. That they are 
strong enough, however, to justify us in regard- 
ing such an interpretation as being, upon the 
whole, likelier to be true than either of the other 
two we have examined, I most firmly believe. 

In next Sunday's sermon we may hope to 
gather up conclusions with reference to the whole 
subject. It will then be found, perhaps, that over 

*The meaning of KoAadiS in Hellenistic Greek has been much 
disputed, but the etymology of the word is certainly not unfriendly 
to the interpretation here suggested, which makes an everlasting 
loss to be a xoXadiS aicovioS. 



HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. II9 

and above the reasons in its favor already alleged, 
the view to-day advanced has this further and 
chiefest recommendation, that without any stretch- 
ing of itself beyond its own proper measure, it 
does wonderfully allow for much that is whole- 
some and precious in each of the two doctrines 
with which it stands contrasted, while yet not 
open to the formidable objections which they pro- 
voke. 

To those of you who presently are to approach 
the table of the Lord, let me say a single word. 
This discussion of a controverted point in theol- 
ogy which has been engaging our minds may 
scarcely seem the best possible sort of preparation 
for receiving the Holy Communion. Not in the 
spirit of debate, not in the polemic temper, would 
any good Christian ever wish to seek intercourse 
with Him who is our peace. And yet what we 
have been considering is only the negative side 
of a truth of which the Church's Eucharistic ser- 
vice is full to overflowing. We have only to 



120 HYPOTHESIS OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 

shift our thoughts from the dark face of this 
subject to the light one, and we not only shall 
find that we have passed from a region of sha- 
dows into a land of sunshine, from the chill air 
of uncertainty into the warm gladness of clearly 
revealed truth; but we shall also realize more 
distinctly, it may be, than we have ever done be- 
fore, how thoroughly from first to last the Lord's 
Supper is a sacrament of heavenly nourishment, 
the symbol and the pledge of a communicated 
life, a " grace given unto us" — not our own. 



VII. 

The Likeliest Belief. 

Hebrews xii : 29. 
For our God is a consuming fire. 

Psalm cxvi : 5. 
. . . Yea, our God is merciful. 

It is the glory of the true faith that it is bold 
to state both of these propositions in the same 
breath, and to stand by them. The two sen- 
tences I have just read happen to have been 
taken from different books of Scripture, but you 
will observe that the sterner saying is quoted from 
the New Testament, and the gentler one from 
the Old. Indeed, there would be no difficulty in 
finding passages in either Testament in which 
these two thoughts — that of God's severity, and 

that of His tender mercy — are put in closest con- 
6 121 



122 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

tact and sharpest contrast. This is not a mat- 
ter in which prophet is arrayed against prophet, 
or Gospel against Law ; but the testimony of all 
the messengers is that the Being from whom they 
come and for whom they speak is alike terrible 
and pitiful, a power to strike dead or to make 
alive, a God who scatters blessings and a God 
who " answereth by fire/' Listen to one of these 
impartial seers, and notice how boldly he blends 
the two strains in one : " Who can stand before 
His indignation? and who can abide in the pres- 
ence of His anger? His fury is poured out like 
fire, and the rocks are thrown down by Him ; M 
and then, without the slightest pause or break, he 
goes on, " The Lord is good, a stronghold in the 
day of trouble, and He knoweth them that trust 
in Him. ,, It is like touching both ends of the 
key-board of a great organ at once. 

We could not have a better introduction than 
this to the line of thought we are meaning to follow 
to-day. I suggested, you will remember, that we 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 23 

should test the doctrine of conditional immortality 
by looking to see how far there might be room in 
it for such features of the other doctrines pre- 
viously considered as had most commended them- 
selves to our judgment on grounds of reasonable 
probability or scriptural warrant. 

We shall see now the great advantage gained 
by our fair treatment (if it was a fair treatment) 
of those opinions which we felt obliged to classi- 
fy as the less likely. Having scanned the best 
that could be said for them, rather than the worst 
that could be said against them, we are now in 
a position to avail ourselves of whatever of truth 
they may have to contribute to our final conclu- 
sion. It is one of the commonplaces of scien- 
tific reasoning that the hypothesis which brings 
into harmony the greatest number of ascertained 
facts is the one most likely to be true. So in our 
dealing with this obscure but momentous problem 
of human destiny, that belief is certainly entitled 
to our best regard which disposes of the greatest 



124 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

number of difficulties with the least amount of 
strain. I have never at any time affirmed, since 
we began studying this subject together, that 
the doctrine of conditional immortality would be 
found wholly free from embarrassment, or that 
an absolute demonstration of it on any ground, 
scriptural or otherwise, could be made out. What 
I did venture to predict was that an impartial 
comparison would show this form of belief to be 
far less encumbered with serious drawbacks than 
either of the other two that divide with it the 
allegiance of Christian thinkers at the present 
day. This may seem to be but a slender claim 
in the eyes of those who think nothing of a doc- 
trine unless it can be proclaimed with a trumpet, 
and yet there are some to whom even the whis- 
perings of truth are grateful, and who rejoice in 
the opening of any door of hope, be the hinge 
moved ever so little and the light let through 
ever so faint. 

At any rate, we will try to find out how well the 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 25 

doctrine of conditional immortality can stand the 
test of comparison by which we have proposed to 
try it ; although before doing so, I shall ask you to 
allow me carefully to restate the doctrine, so that 
there may be no uncertainty as to the true purport 
of it. Believers in conditional immortality, then, 
hold that a never-ending existence is not the com- 
mon heritage of all men in virtue of their having 
been born into this world, but is rather to be regard- 
ed as a gift bestowed on those who seek it from the 
Eternal Himself. They believe that through the 
life-imparting power of the Son of God, who has 
taken our nature upon Him that He may lift it up, 
eternal life becomes rooted, as it were, in those who, 
in St. Paul's phrase, " by patient continuance in 
well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortal- 
ity." Made thus a partaker of the Divine nature, 
man ceases to be, what he was before, a perishable 
creature, and becomes superior to the touch of 
death. Moreover, as common temporal blessings 
come to us many times from sources of which we 



126 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

know nothing, so there may be innumerable souls 
entering upon this eternal life, and many more 
may have entered upon it in the past, knowing 
nothing by name of the Christ to whom they owe 
their enfranchisement with so great a freedom. 
But this ought not to hinder us who do know by 
whom immortality has been brought to light, and 
through whom the grace of eternal life is bestowed, 
from giving Him the glory and the praise ; nor can 
we imagine that from those who have shared the 
benefit the knowledge of the source of it will be 
long concealed. With regard to hopelessly irre- 
claimable rebels against the love of God, it is held 
that their final destiny in the world to come will 
be utter destruction, extinction, cessation of being, 
death. The word " annihilation/' often fastened 
upon this doctrine by those who dissent from it, is 
distasteful to those who hold it, not because of the 
complete reduction to nothingness which the word 
expresses, but because it seems to point to an ar- 
bitrary infliction, a decree suddenly executed upon 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 27 

the offender from without, whereas it is thought 
to be more in consonance with the Divine methods 
that the lost soul should, as it were, simply die out, 
and, with more or less of retributive suffering, gra- 
dually perish, just as a plant might do if carried 
into an uncongenial climate, or as a fountain 
would waver and sink and finally cease as the 
water in the reservoir above became exhausted. 
Some maintainers of this belief go much more 
minutely into the discussion of such details than 
others. The more judicious, however, confine 
themselves to the simple and easily understood 
ground that the final destiny of those whom Christ 
calls "the lost" is extinction. 

With this conception of the real essence of the 
doctrine firmly planted in our minds, let us now 
enter upon the proposed comparison. And first 
we take the opinion which we were led to charac- 
terize as the least likely, namely, that which iden- 
tifies eternal punishment with endless anguish. 

We saw that the strong point in the position held 



128 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF, 

by the maintainors of this belief was their frank ac- 
knowledgment of the fearfulness of the penalty 
which in another world awaits unforgiven and un- 
forsaken sin. There is with them no sentimental 
dilution of the threatenings of God, no explaining 
away of the sentence against the sinner, no gloss- 
ing over the awfulness that rightly attaches to the 
loss of the soul. So far the doctrine is strong, — 
yes, impregnable, for it has Christ behind it. But 
where it betrays its weakness is in its attempt to 
philosophize about the nature of the soul, and its 
resolute determination to assign to man an in- 
herent, natural, inevitable immortality, a thing 
which neither Christ nor His prophets before Him, 
nor His apostles after Him, ever so much as sug- 
gested. 

So long as they content themselves with declar- 
ing the final sentence passed on sin to be irreversi- 
ble, Scripture is so manifestly on their side that 
there are few to dissent ; but the moment they 
import into the Creed their fond notion of the in- 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 29 

destructibility of human nature, they provoke, and 
very properly provoke, rebellion, for they then 
make the result of the irreversible sentence a suf- 
fering absolutely endless, and our sense of justice 
is outraged. 

Observe very carefully what it is that shocks 
the conscience. It is not the irreversible character 
of the doom, but the cruelty of making the doom 
so infinite an anguish. 

Take the earthly administration of justice under 
its best forms. No one finds fault because the de- 
cisions of the Supreme Court are final, or because 
those who lose their causes have to suffer. It is 
recognized as a ruling of common-sense that there 
must be some limit to the right of appeal, some 
point beyond which forbearance can no further 
go ; and it is also agreed by general consent that if 
a penalty has been incurred, that penalty ought to 
be executed. No ; it is not about the principle of 
finality or the principle of penalty that there is 
any serious difference of opinion. But suppose the 



130 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

supreme court were so far to transcend its powers 
as to decree some exquisitely cruel punishment ; 
suppose it were to sentence a criminal to the tor- 
ture, as used to be done in old times, and not only 
so, but were to enjoin upon the torturer that he 
keep his victim alive just as long as possible by 
the use of stimulants, and by careful watching of 
the pulse, what then? Is it not perfectly certain 
that in the minds of the people at large indigna- 
tion toward the criminal for what he had done 
would presently be transformed into sympathy 
with him for what he is called to suffer? If it be 
urged that the parallel is a false one, and the case 
not supposable, seeing that earthly courts exist 
under constitutional safeguards which forbid the 
judges to exaggerate punishment, whereas the Al- 
mighty God is a sovereign absolute, and can do 
what He will with His creatures, I answer that the 
plea is unworthy of a Christian. We know that it 
is written, " My thoughts are not your thoughts, 
neither are your ways my ways ; " but we also know 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 131 

that it is written, again, " Righteousness and judg- 
ment are the habitation of His Throne." To what 
purpose this last assurance, it may well be asked, 
if our idea of righteousness is in no sense and to 
no extent a measure of the righteousness of God? 
Here, then, is the point where the doctrine of end- 
less torment breaks down, and it does so because 
it insists on reading between the lines of revela- 
tion something which is not there, the indestructi- 
bility of man. 

But see, now, how wonderfully the idea of our 
attaining to immortality through the grace of God 
and under the saving power of his life-giving Son 
comes to our relief. Here is room for all the Scrip- 
tures have to say about the awfulness of judg- 
ment. The dark side of retribution is not for one 
moment winked out of sight, nor "the wrath of 
the Lamb/' the fire of hell and the undying worm 
forgotten ; but all this sombre imager}* of destruc- 
tion is recognized as just and true. "The soul 
that sinneth it shall die ;" that is the decree : nor is 



132 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

it to be reckoned strange that around such " second 
death " a horror of great darkness should hang, and 
the sounds of weeping and of wailing and of gnash- 
ing of teeth make themselves heard. During the 
last fifty years what has been the practical result 
of the clinging on the part of the Christian Church 
to this tenet — I will not call it dogma, for, thank 
God ! it never found a place in the universal creed — 
this tenet of endless torment ? The result has been, 
certainly among Protestants, a perilous and most 
questionable silence. John the Baptist, an out- 
spoken man, warned Pharisee and Sadducee to flee 
from the wrath to come. He who was gentleness 
and pity incarnate scrupled not to ask people of 
the highest respectability in the social world of 
that day how they with their whitewashed lives, 
all rotten with falsehood within, could hope to 
escape the damnation of hell. A Paul could speak 
in plainest terms of the flaming fire and everlasting 
destruction awaiting unrighteous men. A James 
could say to the oppressors of his day, " Go to now, 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 33 

ye rich men, weep and howl for the miseries that 
shall come upon you." A Simon Peter could de- 
clare that those who made themselves as natural 
brute beasts should perish in their own corruption. 
A Jude could liken the wicked to the swift meteor, 
the shooting star, to which is reserved the black- 
ness of darkness forever; and a John, mildest of all 
apostles, and yet sternest, too, could say, " There 
is a sin unto death." But, why is it that through 
all these years, for at least half a century, there 
has been such general avoidance in our best in- 
structed pulpits and choicest devotional books of 
language such as this ? Certainly if the words are 
true they ought, at least, to be referred to now and 
then. On the other hand, if they are false, and 
those who spoke them acted under excitement, 
then is the whole fabric of the faith untrustworthy. 
There seems, indeed, to have been a sort of armed 
truce prevailing, the maintainers of the doctrine 
keeping their convictions to themselves, and say- 
ing under their breaths to their opponents, " We 



134 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

hold to this because the Scriptures seem to compel 
us to do so ; but if you will only refrain from con- 
troversy, we on our part will agree to keep silence 
and make no trouble.'' Surely, this was not a 
healthy state of things, and it is very well that it 
should be broken up, even though in the process 
there be the inevitable accompaniment of much 
blasphemous and flippant talk. Believers in eter- 
nal life as the alone gift of Him " who only hath 
immortality " have nothing to fear, and very much 
to hope for, from the discussion. They receive 
Christ's teaching about hell as true. They be- 
lieve that in His words upon this subject, rightly 
understood, lies the key to some of the most per- 
plexing questions of modern thought. They do 
not admit that this view of the matter has any 
tendency to make people think lightly of the con- 
sequences of sin ; but, on the contrary, they are 
convinced that by bringing down the penalty from 
the scale of infinity, where it simply baffles the 
imagination, to the scale of measurable time, where 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 35 

it becomes something that can be pictured and 
made real to the mind, they are in point of fact 
doing far more to make " the terror of the Lord " 
a real power for good, a practical instrument of 
persuasion, than those are who so far overstate 
the truth of God as to bring it into certain and 
fatal disrepute. Men dread punishments more in 
proportion to the certainty of them than in pro- 
portion to their awfulness. Experience in the line 
of criminal law has abundantly proved this. Many 
a man, by convincing himself that endless suffering 
as the punishment of temporal guilt is incredible, 
has silently settled into the persuasion that punish- 
ment of any sort is unlikely — a state of mind, if 
Christianity be true, fraught with the deadliest 
peril. But show to such a man a form of belief 
not chargeable with unreason, hold up to him the 
promise of eternal life made in Jesus Christ, will 
he then have any reasonable ground of complaint, 
any plausible plea of unjust treatment, if in the 
end he finds a gift which he deliberately refused 



136 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

forfeited in consequence of such refusal? If a 
parent offers his son at twenty a position which 
will insure him a successful career, and the boy 
from pure self-will, or perhaps out of a vain notion 
that he can do better for himself, refuses it, cer- 
tainly no one blames the father if at forty the son 
finds himself in the streets without a home and 
without a fortune. The force of this illustration 
may indeed be destroyed by denying free-will, but 
then if we deny free-will, we at the same time 
make impossible any religion worth the having. 
Thus we see that when put into comparison with 
the belief in endless torment, the likeliest opinion, 
as we have called it, has this advantage, that it al- 
lows for much that is plainly true about that form 
of doctrine, while itself remaining free from the 
blemishes which make the harsher view incredible. 
We have, next, to compare conditional immor- 
tality with restorationism. We found that the 
strength of this last-named belief lay in its tender 
Christ-like sympathy with all souls, and in its pity 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 37 

for that immense multitude, which no man can 
number, of whom we feel moved to say that they 
have never had a fair chance. On the other hand, 
we saw plainly that the weak point of this hy- 
pothesis betrayed itself in an almost utter avoid- 
ance of the sterner aspects of Christ's teaching. 

The restorationist has it for his aim to persuade 
us that, after all, no one will finally be lost, no stone 
missing from the temple 

" When God hath made the pile complete, " 

a most genial hope, but one to which the words 
of Scripture, it must be owned, lend little color. 
A few dim suggestions there may be, scattered 
here and there through the Bible, which it is pos 
sible to regard as looking in that direction ; but 
Christ and His apostles, as we watch them in their 
teachings, do not seem bent upon impressing men 
with the belief that it will be well with the ungod- 
ly and the sinner in the end. The prevailing 
strain and drift are of another sort, nor are the 
parables of Nature any more encouraging. 



138 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

As respects the lot of those who have never 
been granted any opportunity of finding the light 
and knowing the truth in this world, the doctrine 
of conditional immortality is simply silent. As 
Christ has not condemned them, neither does it 
condemn them. Whatever gleams of hope there 
may anywhere be to encourage us on this score, 
are at least as available for the Christian who be- 
lieves that the final issue for those who reject God 
will be destruction as for those who believe that 
that issue will be restoration. 

In an attempt to answer the question, " What 
shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel 
of God ? " speculation as to the destiny of those 
who have never had any opportunity to obey it is 
irrelevant. 

Christ spoke of bringing other sheep, not of the 
then existing flock, into His fold. How know we 
that in ways and places hidden from us He may 
hot be seeking and saving still? Be this so or be 
it not so, the practical question for you and me is 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 1 39 

untouched ; for ours is not the case of those who 
have had no light, but the case of those who have 
all the light there is. What will the end be for 
us if we keep on in selfishness and pride and 
contempt of the holy will, if we are full of hard- 
ness of heart and bitterness, or sunk in sensual 
sin? Will all this "when it is finished " bring 
forth life ? No ; for the end of these things is 
death. 

Thus we see how it is that the believer in hu- 
man immortality as a conditional thing can, with 
equal readiness, assent to the teaching of either 
one of our two texts. That our God is a con- 
suming fire, he has no reason to deny ; that our 
God is merciful, he is thankful to believe. 

There is a substance which enters far more 
largely than any other into the composition of 
this earth where we are living, and in the absence 
of which not one of us could survive an hour. It 
constitutes one-half of the crust of the globe, 
more than four-fifths of the ocean, and more than 



140 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

three-fourths of our very bodies themselves.* It 
is one of the so-called "elements," or world-ma- 
terials, and the chemists name it " oxygen." 

The marvellous thing about this omnipresent 
element is the two-fold character which it seems 
to bear. It is at once the mildest and the fiercest 
of all the elements, alike the nourisher and de- 
stroyer of whatever lives. It is the upbuilder 
and the scavenger of Nature. Nothing can grow 
without its aid, and yet when that which grows 
has passed its prime and done its work, it is this 
same element which is most active in the work of 
needed destruction. It is the vital ingredient in 
the very air we breathe ; we move in it, we feed on 
it, we think by aid of it, and yet when we are look- 
ing in dismay on a burning city or watching in 
autumn woods the dank and repulsive processes 
of decay, how hard to realize that the very same 
agent which bestows life when it is needed, and 

* Cooke's Religion and Chemistry, p. 77. 



THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 141 

fosters it where it is strong, is also everywhere at 
work tearing down that which has been adjudged 
worthless, and taking from him which hath not 
even that which he seemeth to have ! Have we 
not here a most suggestive parable of the work 
of the Spirit of God in the universe unseen ? He 
also is the very atmosphere that wraps and feeds 
us. In Him we live and move and have our 
being. The warmth that cheers us is His holy 
comfort. The spiritual rock of which we drink 
is He. Yet, all the while, He is, remember, the 
consuming fire ; and when the trial day arrives, if 
there be nothing in us that shall be worth sur- 
vival, what wonder if we be devoured as stubble 
fully dry ? Oh, how little we realize, dear friends, 
the tremendous agencies that are at work all 
around us, silently and certainly preparing for us 
a future to which we scarcely give a thought! 
On we go, coursing through space upon this 
whirling ball we call the earth, nursing our silly 
pride, our petty jealousies, our poor ambitions, 



142 THE LIKELIEST BELIEF. 

and all the while on either side, before, behind, 
above, below, are the chained forces from which 
were God to loosen the grasp of His hand one 
single moment, it would be all over with us in 
a flash. Like the somnambulist, with his eyes 
holden, man walks along the perilous path of his 
own choice, safe for the moment, but safe only 
because he sees not things as they are. Wake 
him, and he falls. How will it be with us in that 
waking which is to come with the resurrection 
morning? 

Shall we be among those who stand or those 
who fall ? That depends on whether in this life 
present we learn to distinguish the shadow from 
the substance, and choose to fasten our affections 
upon things which cannot be removed. 



VIII. 
Christ's Law of Survival. 

Psalm cxxxix : 24. 
. . . lead me in the way everlasting. 

John xiv : 6. 
• . . Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way . 

WITH a genuine sense of relief, we turn this 
morning from the thoughts about the dark side 
of human destiny which have engrossed our atten- 
tion during Lent to the bright and cheerful out- 
look opened to us in the Resurrection of the Son 
of God.* 

Whoever the author of our first text may have 
been, whether David or a later psalmist, it is evi- 
dent that the question he had in mind was a prac- 
tical rather than a speculative one. He had ob- 

* Preached on Easter Day. 

143 



144 CHRIST S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

served that the characteristic of most of what went 
on around him in the world was transiency, and he 
wanted to find out, if he could, how to live so as 
to have his life possess some solid and permanent 
value ; hence his prayer, " Lead me in the way 
everlasting." 

Among the figures of speech which date back to 
the beginnings of things, and are likely to con- 
tinue in use while the world stands, this one of the 
path, or way, is prominent. Food, clothing, sun- 
shine, shelter, keep a lasting place in the imagery 
of religion, for the reason that they stand for uni- 
versal wants which will always exist so long as 
man continues what he is. The bread and water 
of life ; the robe and armor of righteousness ; the 
light of the world ; the house not made with hands ; 
the covert and the rock— when will these expres- 
sions become antiquated and obsolete? We may 
safely say, Never. Religion cannot spare them. 
They make the sign-language by dint of which she 
gets access to the deaf conscience through the eye 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 145 

of the imagination. However short our list of 
these primary symbols (and we could not make it 
a long one were we to try) room must at any rate 
be found in it for the figure which distinguishes 
both of to-day's texts, — the Way. This also is one 
of those abiding parables which never can be out- 
lawed by lapse of time. The need of the path to 
walk in begins when man's conflict with the hard- 
ness of savage Nature begins. The world is a wide 
place, and the fewer people there are in it, the 
wider it is. Imagine it wholly trackless, and it is 
hard to see how life could be sustained. There 
must be means of access to the bubbling spring ; 
there must be some certainty of communicating 
with the nearest neighbor, or the battle is sure to 
go against poor, defenceless man. It is absolutely 
necessary that he should know how to find the 
places where help lies. He cannot be expected 
to strike out upon the wilderness at a pure ven- 
ture and succeed every time. His Maker has with- 
held from him the mysterious instinct by dint 
7 



146 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

of which the bee goes straight to his hive, and the 
wild fowl to her nest. A path, therefore, a track, 
a way, of some sort, he must have or else per- 
ish from off the earth. 

Hence we find that all along, from earliest 
times, the roads of a country have been looked at 
as the measure of its progress in civilization. The 
greater the facilities of travel, the higher the en- 
lightenment, for intercourse is one of the causes 
of enlightenment; and intercourse there cannot 
be without journeying to secure it. We remember 
the old Romans by their roads almost as much as 
by their laws, and to-day one of the chief boasts of 
modern society is that the ends of the earth have 
been brought within everybody's easy reach by 
the abundance of all sorts of ways, paths once un- 
dreamed of. 

Now, the startling thing about our Psalmist's 
prayer is that in it he asks to be guided in a kind 
of path to which our experience of ordinary travel 
furnishes no parallel. One feature which is com- 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 147 

mon to all ways scored on the earth's surface is 
their certainty of coming to an end. Every one 
of them brings up at some terminus or otherj 
but this man says, " Lead me in the way everlast- 
ing." 

Clearly, we have reached a point where we must 
part company with the things seen, and go out 
into the region of spiritual experience. 

To speak plainly, the thing we want to know 
is whether there really exists, what the author 
of this prayer evidently thought there might be, 
a sort of life which can count itself independent 
of the shocks of change, which may be depended 
upon to endure. 

If we will survey the history of religion given 
us in the Bible, as one might look down from a 
steep acclivity over some extended plain, we shall 
be convinced, I think, that all through the long 
reach of time covered by that chronicle there 
runs a path which, beginning in obscurity, is 
continually becoming better and still better de- 



148 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

fined, until there is no mistaking it. The name 
of the path is " the Way of life : " to be in it is 
to be safe ; to be out of it is to be lost. 

Condense the spirit of the Old Testament re- 
ligion into fewest possible words, and what have 
we? Something like this: "He hath showed 
thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the 
Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " 

That is " the path " as it ran through the cen- 
turies before Christ ; and everywhere we find those 
who have anything to say about it ascribing to 
it this characteristic of permanency, endurance, 
lastingness. Other paths there are branching off 
from this royal highway and striking out in all 
sorts of directions — paths of self-will, paths of 
ambition, paths of cruelty, paths of covetousness, 
paths of lust — but they lead to no end; they run 
out into vacancy, and, sooner or later, the man 
who has chosen one of them finds himself lost, 
fortunate indeed if there be time enough left to 



CHRIST S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 1 49 

allow of his getting back before sundown to that 
only pathway in which there is no death. 

The form the promise made to righteousness 
took in those old times was longevity. When 
wisdom was personified, she stood with " length of 
days " in her right hand. Reverence for parents, 
one of the foundation-stones of religion, looked for 
its reward, you remember, under Moses' law in 
this same direction : " Honor thy father and thy 
mother that thy days may be long." And, again, 
of the devout and trustful man it is said in the 
Psalms, " With long life will I satisfy him and 
show him my salvation. " 

How far these promises looked beyond the ho- 
rizon of the earthly pilgrimage, or whether they 
looked beyond it at all, it may be difficult to say. 
It is enough for our purpose to observe this one 
point, that from the beginning a certain dura- 
bility, toughness of fibre, power of wear, have been 
associated with a particular type of character. 
The wicked prosper ; the unrighteous make a brave 



ISO CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

show ; for a time they seem to have a firm foot- 
hold on the earth ; they call the lands after their 
own names : but it is only for a time : presently 
there comes a withering blast, and they are gone. 
" Yea, even like as a dream when one awaketh ; 
so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of 
the city." The idea seems to be that evil is some- 
thing which has no principle of stability in it at all. 

The Bible is very seldom satirical, and yet if 
one of the older translations is right — and some 
recent critics think that it is — there certainly is a 
touch of satire in what is said in one place of 
the thoroughly bad man : " Take away his un- 
godliness and thou shalt find — no one." The 
ungodliness, that is to say, is all there is of him. 
Only think of a manhood of which it can be thus 
declared that it is a mere shell, a painted mask, 
a crust, a showy bubble-surface enclosing nothing ! 

The naturalists have had much to say of late 
years about the newly discovered law of the survi- 
val of the fittest ; but in the history of religion this 



CHRIST S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 151 

is no new discovery. As early as in the family 
lists of the Book of Genesis we find the principle 
asserting itself, and indeed the whole Bible, from 
beginning to end, may be said to be one long illus- 
tration and enforcement of that law. But who are 
the fittest ? Ah ! there we touch the very point of 
difference that severs, as light from darkness, the 
law of survival that rules in the kingdom of Nature 
from the law of survival that rules in the kingdom 
of Christ. Who are the fittest ? We know the 
answer Nature has to give us : The fittest are the 
strongest, and the strongest are the fittest. The 
lion's paw that can strike the hardest blow, the 
beak and talons that make shortest work of the 
prey, these secure survival in the fierce struggle for 
life continually going on among the lower crea- 
tures, these breed the aristocracy of the jungle and 
the forest. Nor need we, for that matter, stop at 
the line which sunders man from brute. Take 
human society as it exists apart from Christ, and 
it is impossible to deny that here also, to a great 



152 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

degree, the same hard law prevails — the strongest 
seem to have their way ; the weak seem to go to 
the wall. Napoleon, in his coarse fashion, con- 
fessed to faith in this philosophy of life when he 
threw out the easy sneer, so often repeated since 
his day, that Providence is on the side of the 
heaviest battalions. But was he right? Not if 
our Lord Jesus Christ was right when He laid 
down His law of survival in words like these: 
" Verily, verily I say unto you, except a corn of 
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
alone ; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. 
He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that 
hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life 
eternal. ,, This also is the announcement of a law 
of survival, nay, of a law of survival of the fittest ; 
but notice most carefully what the standard of 
fitness is, for it is widely unlike that which the 
successful soldier had in mind. Christ's law of 
survival accounts as the fittest, not those whom 
public opinion reckons to be the best equipped for 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 153 

the battle of life, and the most likely to win the 
world's prizes, but those who have the qualities 
which in His own experience here among us 
brought Him to the cross — meekness, long-suffer- 
ing, gentleness, faith, patience. 

Now then, we are in a good position to discern 
the link that fastens our second text to the first. 
" Lead me in the way everlasting," said the Psalm- 
ist. " Jesus saith unto him, I am the way." How 
much did Christ add to what was already under- 
stood before His coming with respect to this way 
everlasting? What know we about eternal life 
which David, for example, or Isaiah could not 
know? 

The difference is the difference between our 
daylight here in the temperate zone, and the day- 
light of the people far to the north of us at the 
season of the year when all that can be seen is a 
faint glow along the edge of the earth's shoulder, 
enough to certify that there is a sun, and that he 
does shine somewhere, but not enough to stir 

7* 



154 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

men's hearts to cheerfulness or to rouse their wills 
into activity. 

Christ came into the world like morning sun- 
shine, and by revealing Himself as the source and 
fount of light, " the master-light " indeed " of all 
our seeing," He brought life and immortality to 
light. Before the bringing in of the gospel of the 
Resurrection men had groped after the way of 
life, and even when they had found it, scarcely 
realized how far it would carry them. Jesus came 
and said, " I am the resurrection and the life : he 
that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth 
in me shall never die." We bury our dead with 
these words upon our lips to-day, words of triumph, 
words of glad, sure confidence; but time was when 
there were no such words to say ; time was when 
the utmost that could be attained to was a dim, 
struggling hope as to the future of the souls which 
sleep. 

How wise the Church has been in stating the 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 1 55 

positive side of this grand truth, and leaving the 
negative side undefined! The ancient creeds that 
have come down from primitive times, and which, 
by common consent, contain the marrow and pith 
of Christianity, say nothing at all about the nature 
and extent of penalty. They are content to leave 
vengeance with Him to whom vengeance belong- 
eth ; they let the curse alone ; and what they do 
ask us to confess our faith in is the blessing. " I 
believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the 
life of the world to come ; " "I believe in the life 
everlasting/' These are the strong affirmations of 
the Church catholic. Would that modern creed- 
makers had always shown themselves equally dis- 
creet ! 

There are two senses in which we may under- 
stand what Christ says about His being Himself 
the way of life ; and in both these senses what He 
says is true. 

He is our "way," or means of access, to eternal 
life, in virtue of what He has done ; and He is 



156 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

our "way" also, in virtue of what he has taught. 
In other words, we owe it to Him that a way 
there is, and we also owe it to Him that we un- 
derstand how we ought to walk in the way, now 
that it is opened. Look with me for a few mo- 
ments before we quit our subject at each of these 
two points. No one, I think, who reads the New 
Testament with honest eyes can fail to see that 
the story spread over its pages is the record of a 
great work wrought for man. Reject the whole 
thing as a delusion if you will ; treat every Gospel 
as a fairy tale and every Epistle as a forgery: 
even then you scarcely will be bold enough to 
deny that what Gospels and Epistles purport to 
be, just as they stand, is, as I have said, the ac- 
count of a great effort undertaken by one called 
the Son of God, and by Him at great cost 
achieved. What was that effort, what that 
achievement? Was it not the lifting of human 
nature to a higher level, and the opening to man 
of larger prospects and loftier skies ? The suffer- 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 1 57 

ing and the death of Christ seem to have been 
associated in His own mind, and in the minds of 
those who were nearest to Him, with some signal 
victory, in the advantage of which all the world 
should share. We see foretokening signs of this 
very early in the narrative. Even in the sunny 
days of the ministries in Galilee and Judea, if 
"sunny" we have a right to call any of the days 
of the Man of Sorrows ; even then the cloud-sha- 
dows, from time to time, move significantly across 
the scene. He speaks in a way that startles the 
disciples of the things that are destined to befall 
Him — the mocking, the scourging, and the cross. 
He sees beforehand the cup that He must drink 
of, and the baptism that He must be baptized 
with. And when, at last, we find Him in Geth- 
semane, anticipating in His agony the passion 
which is soon to follow, it is as if we were looking 
on a leader of armies alone in his tent on the eve 
of some tremendous battle which is to decide the 
destinies of a whole race. Now, what was the 



158 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

conflict, what the victory ? The conflict was with 
all the powers of evil that war against man and 
spoil his peace. The victory was the rising from 
the dead, the bringing of many sons unto glory, 
" the opening of the gates of life eternal " to all 
who press forward to follow where the captain 
leads. Let Jesus answer for himself: "I am the 
Good Shepherd ; the Good Shepherd giveth his 
life for the sheep." " My sheep hear my voice, 
and I know them, and they follow me, and they 
shall never perish." " I am come that they might 
have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly." " Verily, verily, I say unto you, he 
that believeth in me hath everlasting life." "I 
am that bread of life," " and the bread that I will 
give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of 
the world." Is it objected that every one of 
these strong sayings is taken from a single book 
of Scripture? I answer that they can all be 
matched for intensity by words from the writings 
of St. Paul, who certainly was independent of 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 1 59 

the special influences that may have swayed the 
author of the Fourth Gospel. Yes, this is the gen- 
eral purport of the New Testament teaching, that 
just as a daring leader captures and opens a road 
which is all-important to his army's success, so 
Christ through sufferings, the necessity for which 
and the extent of which we can only dimly guess, 
won for us an entrance into life eternal. Many will 
call this " mystical " language, and will clamor for 
something more logical. God forbid that one 
should disparage logic ! But God forbid also that 
one should talk about divine things as if logic were 
enough ! 

In deep-sea sounding it is a sad blunder to sup- 
pose that the man with the lead has touched bot- 
tom simply because he has let out all the line at 
his command. It is no proof of my having searched 
the end of the matter that I hold the end of the 
rope in my hand. To make positive assertions as 
to just how much deeper the ocean is than I have 
gone with the plummet, is indeed an unwarranta- 



l6o CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

ble thing ; but then to say confidently that there 
is no deeper depth, is equally an affront put upon 
the truth. 

I said that .not only had Christ opened to us a 
new and living way into the unseen and the eter- 
nal, but that He had also told us how we ourselves 
might be kept in the way. The imitation of 
Christ — that, for you and me, is the way of life. 
To be always seeking to be like Him, walking in 
His steps, bearing His cross, curbing rebellious 
self, keeping under whatever in us it is which ex- 
alts itself against God's holy will — that is what it 
is to be led in " the way everlasting." 

Dare not hastily to stigmatize this teaching by 
hard names. Dare not to call it " legalism," or 
" mere morality," or " reliance upon good works," 
— dare not to do this until you are perfectly cer- 
tain that in doing so you have the mind of Christ, 
and that you speak with authority from Him. The 
" way of the cross " is the " way of life," and on this 
earth you shall look in vain for any easier way. 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. l6l 

Eternal life is not the reward of a momentary 
flush of feeling ; but to those who daily seek it, 
the daily bread which feeds the soul is freely 
given. 

So deeply did these thoughts about the Saviour 
as the way of life sink into the hearts of His earli- 
est disciples, that they actually for a time gave 
the name to the new religion. It is a curious fact, 
and one which escapes the notice of many, even 
among the careful readers of the New Testament, 
that before the followers of Jesus had come to 
be called " Christians " at all, they were already 
known as " the people of the way." Saul went to 
Damascus with letters to the synagogue that if 
he found any of "this way," he might put them 
under arrest. In one of his speeches, he says of 
himself, you remember, " I persecuted this way 
unto the death." Of the unbelievers at Ephesus, 
it is alleged that they "spake evil of that way; " 
and, a little later in the narrative, we read that 
" there arose no small stir about that way." 



1 62 CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 

So then, as Christ's disciples, we are "the people 
of the way," pilgrims of the path ; and what a 
magnificent privilege it is ! We look backward 
into the past, far, far away, until the eye is baf- 
fled by the distance, we look backward and note 
the track along which God has been bringing His 
people through the ages that are gone. It is as 
when one stands on a ship's deck at night, and 
watches the vessel's wake as it reaches out across 
the blackness of the sea, revealed by its own phos- 
phorescent light. All around is the thick dark- 
ness, overhead are the silent stars ; but there 
astern, lies the track, witnessing by its very pres- 
ence in that waste of waters that an intelligent 
mind is guiding the vessel's course, and that the 
voyagers are assured whence they came and 
whither they go. 

Looking back over the great deep of human 
history, so vast, so unintelligible, so strangely agi- 
tated by stormy wind and tempest, so mysteriously 
swayed by current and counter-current — is it not 



CHRIST'S LAW OF SURVIVAL. 1 63 

a happy thing to be able to discern the shining 
wake, and to remember that we are in the ship 
with Jesus? He leads in "the way everlast- 
ing. 



IX, 

The Heaven for Man. 

John xiv : 2. 
In my Father's house are many mansions : if it were not so, I 
would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 

The most startling feature of these statements 
is their positiveness. There is no hint of any un- 
certainty on the speaker's part. His tone is not 
that of one who is hazarding a conjecture, sug- 
gesting a possibility ; it is pure, dogmatic assertion, 
nothing less. The implication is, " We speak that 
we do know, and testify that we have seen." One 
is at liberty to reject the speech and the testimony 
as being those of a deceiver, if one chooses ; but 
there can be no halfway course. This Christ, who 
thus addresses us as a teacher having authority, 
must be either wholly welcomed or wholly set aside. 

And this very circumstance it is which makes 

164 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 65 

Christian believing a happy thing to those who do 
believe. It is the dogmatic character of the Gos- 
pel, the strong Yea and Amen which it carries on 
its front, that makes it a message of comfort. 
Christendom was not built upon the foundation of 
a peradventure, but the corner-stone of the Church 
is a person — Jesus Christ. Accepting Him, we 
believe His words — that is the whole of it. Let us, 
then, this morning, take this saying of His, and try 
to see what it contains, how much it suggests, 
whither it leads. 

When we look at the verse critically, we find 
that it is made up of two distinct statements, 
linked together by a phrase of reassurance. " In 
my Father's house are many mansions ; " that 
is the first statement. " I go to prepare a place 
for you ; " that is the second statement. And 
between these comes the friendly reminder, the 
comfortable word well suited to re-enforce a faint- 
ing heart, that doubts even while it loves and 
hopes, " If it were not so, I would have told you." 



1 66 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

Look at the first statement : " In my Father's 
house are many mansions/' The modern English 
usage of the word " mansion " makes it mean a 
building of rather more than ordinary pretensions, 
something midway between a home and a palace. 
In the English of the Bible it is evident that this 
cannot be the sense in which the word is meant to 
be received, for, so understood, the house ought 
rather to be within the mansion than the mansion 
within the house. The precise rendering is, " In 
my Father's house are many abiding-places," or as 
we should say familiarly, many rooms, many apart- 
ments. 

How wonderfully these words have been illumi- 
nated and opened out by what it has been given 
man to discover with his eyes and his mind since 
the day they were spoken ! Observe how entirely 
Christ grasps the thought of the unity of the 
whole scheme of Nature. To Him it is, all of it, 
" my Father's house." Loose thinkers and hasty 
writers would have us believe that this idea of the 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 67 

oneness of the universe, the correlation of its parts 
and powers, and its subjection to uniform con- 
trol, is a modern discovery : but, no ; it has lain 
firmly bedded in the Hebrew tradition from the 
beginning. The unity of God is the fountain truth 
from w T hich flows all that the Bible has to tell. 
The other religions distributed gods through Na- 
ture, wherever they seemed to be needed ; some 
for the oceans and the rivers, others for the moun- 
tains and forests, these for the heights, those for 
the depths; but ^the true seers of Jehovah never 
thought or taught after this fashion. " The heav- 
ens are Thine/' their invocation ran ; " the earth 
also is Thine ; Thou hast laid the foundation of 
the round world and all that therein is." What 
if the " round world " meant to them a circle rather 
than a sphere ? That matters nothing, except to the 
pettiest of critics. We also in our day have many 
beliefs about the earth and sky which will need 
revising presently. The point is, that they grasped 
the grand truth of the unity of the works of God. 



1 68 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

They saw the manifoldness indeed, as the others 
did, but they were not upset by it, as the others 
were ; for behind all outward show of diversity, 
they discerned a majestic oneness of purpose, plan, 
and government. All this is summed up in Christ's 
bold figure, " My Father's house/' The universe, 
with all its marvellous complexity of parts and 
proportions, is a house, and this house not a mere 
workshop, not a factory, not a roofed and glazed 
and boarded shed to hold machinery or stores, but 
a dwelling : it is a Father's house. Yes, we do 
greatly need these words of Christ's as a corrective 
and balance to the desolateness of spirit in which 
so much of the talk which we hear nowadays 
about the universe is apt to leave us. Mingle this 
thought of fatherhood with all that the telescope 
has to tell of the infinitely great, and all that the 
microscope reveals of the infinitely little, and every 
fresh discovery will bring fresh delight. Leave 
the fatherhood out, and, like the sad king, you 
shall surely find in that much wisdom much grief, 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 69 

and mournfully confess that " he that increaseth 
knowledge increaseth sorrow." Blank space has in 
itself nothing to interest us, nor the mere thought 
of time. Who cares to have a picture of the desert 
on his walls ? Or what charm is there in an end- 
less almanac? Thought and feeling and conscience 
— these are the realities that carry a joy with 
them ; and when we miss these, we are forlorn. 
What are the myriads of the stars to me if there 
is no one anywhere who calls them all by their 
names ? Or why should I care whether it were a 
billion or a trillion years that the molten earth 
rolled around in its track, unless I believed that a 
hand was guiding it all the while to a better des- 
tiny, and making it ready for a blessing to come ? 
Oh no, we cannot spare this persuasion of the 
divine fatherhood ! Arithmetic will never fill the 
gap. Figures, no matter how large, how imposing, 
you make them, cannot feed the soul ; and souls 
we have, and they are hungry souls. 

The God of the chemists and the geologists 
8 



170 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

and the astronomers, if existence be conceded 
to Him at all, would seem to be pure intellect. 
The God of the Bible is this ; but He is more than 
this : He is a God who rejoiceth in the " habitable " 
parts of His earth, and whose delights are with 
the sons of men. He " built all things," but He 
is not an architect without a heart. The house- 
making does not rank before the fatherhood, but 
the fatherhood before the house-making. 

But notice, as we pass on, Christ's way of 
speaking of the fatherhood ; for it is peculiar. 
He does not say, " In your Father's house," or 
'■ In our Father's house," but "In my Father's 
house." This is the language of the heir-apparent, 
rather than that of the ordinary subject, of the 
realm. When we take it in connection with other 
instances of the same mode of speech on Christ's 
part, we cannot help inferring a special dignity 
which attaches to His Sonship and does not at- 
tach to ours. His way of speaking of the house 
suggests an intimacy there which no one else 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 171 

might claim. We are reminded by it of those 
mysterious passages of New Testament Scripture 
in which the Son is associated with the Father in 
the work of creation. The Father is pictured to 
us as the Creator, but it is " by " the Son that He 
creates. " God, who created all things by Jesus 
Christ, " is a phrase of St. Paul's. " His Son by 
whom also He made the worlds," is an expression 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews. And St. John 
puts it in the very strongest way when he says 
that " without Him," meaning the Word which 
was made flesh, " without Him was not anything 
made that was made." " My Father's house" in- 
deed ! Who shall question His right to use the 
exclusive "my," rather than the inclusive "our," 
if in the rearing of the house He bore so signal a 
part? Nay, more; is it not this fellowship of the 
Father and the Son which makes the house, which 
otherwise might be a house only, into a home? 
But this by the way. What we are chiefly con- 
cerned with just now is the characteristic which 



172 ' THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

Christ in these words of His assigns to the Father's 
house. It is a roomy house. He says — a house of 
many apartments. Let us make an effort to un- 
derstand what this may mean. 

Some students of the passage see in the reference 
to the " many mansions/' a recognition of the di- 
versities that prevail among men, both as respects 
their abilities and their tastes. People are sorted 
out here on earth, so they reason, according to 
their characteristics, inborn or acquired. Those, 
who have common likings and common pursuits 
are naturally drawn together, and enjoy one an- 
other's society, while those who have not these 
bonds of sympathy as naturally grow apart. Thus 
we have race distinctions and class distinctions 
without number, clubs, unions, associations, soci- 
eties, and the like, and, according to the interpre- 
tation I speak of, the " many mansions " of the 
Father's house are intended to accommodate these 
differences. Every man is to find there his right 
place, associates congenial to him, surroundings 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 73 

that meet his own special needs ; in a word, to use 
the cant phrase — his " true sphere." I state this 
interpretation of the words, not with a view to 
maintaining it, but only in order to combat it. As 
an interpretation, it seems to me to be open to 
two serious objections. In the first place, it runs 
counter to the whole tenor of Christ's teaching. 
It is true that we find human society cut up into 
hundreds of divisions and thousands of subdivi- 
sions ; but if I read the New Testament aright, 
the drift and purpose of our Saviour's mission is 
the removal of barriers, rather than the mainte- 
nance of them. I mean, of course, the barriers 
that keep men from a larger and better sympa- 
thy with one another. The barriers that fence in 
righteousness Christ strengthened ; for the liberty 
of the Gospel does not mean the liberty to do 
what we please ; but the barriers which the Gos- 
pel seeks to break down are barriers that shut 
heart from heart and soul from soul, the parti- 
tion walls that rest on foundations of pride and 



174 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

selfishness and prejudice. He shed His blood 
that He might draw us to God, and, in drawing 
us to Him, draw us to one another. Not that He 
might assort them into little companies, and shut 
them up in little rooms, did Christ die for men, 
but rather that He might gather out of every 
race and every clime and every country a great 
company which should be one family in Him. 

The history of modern civilization bears out 
this view of the case. If there be in the cur- 
rent of affairs, as we are able to observe it, any 
one tendency more marked than another, it is 
the tendency toward recognizing the oneness of 
mankind. 

The abolition of slavery, now gradually going 
on all over the world, is a fruit of the truth first 
emphasized by Christ that all men are brethren. 
The international exhibitions, which have become 
a recognized feature in the landscape of our mod- 
ern life, are also illustrations of the same longing 
after a better union and communion. And in all 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 75 

quarters where Christ's doctrine is received, and 
His influence felt, we see how earnest is the desire 
of men to be drawn together, how keen their dis- 
trust of all that would separate and sunder them. 
Again, another objection to looking at the 
"many mansions " as a device for accommodating 
the many sorts of people that make up the world 
lies here — it is too narrow an interpretation, in 
view of all that we now know about the extent of 
God's creation. The Heavenly Father doubtless 
has other families besides His family of men. It 
was natural, perhaps inevitable, that those who 
thought of this earth as the theatre of all God's 
operations, and of the sky, with its greater and 
its lesser lights, as only an appendage to the earth 
— it was natural, I say, that such persons, medi- 
tating upon this text of ours, should have seemed 
to themselves shut up to some such interpreta- 
tion of it as the one I am seeking to discredit. 
For whom, they argued, could the many man- 
sions be intended if not for the many varieties of 



176 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

people, the many sorts of saints, who were des- 
tined to make up the host of the redeemed ? 

But God in His providence has opened to us 
larger horizons than they saw ; our eyes take in 
a wider sweep of the universe than theirs could ; 
and we can bring to the study and interpreta- 
tion of the Word of God helps of which they knew 
nothing. 

And now, in order to make my meaning clearer, 
I shall ask you to pass from the statement with 
which the text opens to the one with which it 
ends, " I go to prepare a place for you." Think 
of Him as addressing not those twelve disciples 
only, but as speaking to all who should be His 
disciples in the long years to come. Think of 
yourself, if you are a believer in Him, have given 
your heart, have consecrated your life to His ser- 
vice — think of yourself as one of those to whom 
this thing is said, " I go to prepare a place for 
you." The place He went to prepare, so I would 
have you receive the teaching of this text, was 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 77 

one of those " many mansions." They are not 
all for us; but He has gone to make ready one 
of them for us. " For us men and for our salva- 
tion, He came down from heaven," we say in the 
Creed ; yes, and for us men and for our salvation, 
He went up to heaven. At once the profoundest 
and the most scriptural view of the mission of 
Christ is that it was intended to lift up humanity. 
He took our nature upon Him that He might 
raise it, exalt it, set it up on high. His ascen- 
sion into the heavens was not a merely personal 
act only — it was a representative act also ; it pic- 
tured to the eye, imaged to the mind, the real 
thing that Christ had done for man, is doing for 
him now. " I go to prepare a place for you." 
What He means is that in His death and resurrec- 
tion and ascension, His " redeeming work," as we 
are accustomed to call it, there lay wrapped up a 
power to lift mankind to a higher sort of existence. 
He will make heaven possible for man by making 

things ready for him there. How eagerly a child 
8* 



178 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

will say to the playmate who is going in first to 
some show or merrymaking, " Keep a place for 
me ! " And may we not discern in the longing that 
fills the upturned eyes of the disciples who watch 
their Lord as He ascends something of the same 
natural desire — a childish desire, no doubt, when 
directed to childish ends, but a most human desire 
when, looking off from the coasts of the life that 
is, we gaze wistfully toward the dim edges of the 
life which is to come? " Keep a place for you?" 
we hear our Lord reply ; " yes, better than that, I 
go to make a place for you." 

It does seem very strange that the thinkers and 
talkers of our times, who have so much to say 
about the evolution of man from lower forms of 
creature life, have so little to say about his pos- 
sible development in the future. The same rea- 
soning which shows that man has risen to his 
present position from something that was less than 
man, ought, at least, to suggest that he may yet 
rise to something that shall be more than man. 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 79 

There is nothing to prove that the last rung of the 
ladder has been touched, the final term of the 
series reached. The Church not only believes in 
such a future exaltation of man, but it links that 
exaltation to the person of Christ. He took "the 
manhood into God " is the assertion of the strict- 
est and most precise of all the formularies of 
the faith. By His agony and bloody sweat, His 
cross and passion, His precious death and burial, 
His glorious resurrection and ascension — by all 
this, He was the means of lifting up humanity 
into a greatness and a blessedness that did not be- 
long to it before. This is the Church's faith, and 
has always been. And how grand it is ! Monot- 
ony and dulness vanish from life when we think of 
the possibilities that are to open for it in the place 
which Christ is making ready for His people. 
History gains a new dignity as soon as we have 
learned to trace on its pages the hints of this 
slowly-fulfilling purpose of the patient God. De- 
spondency ? Who dares to be despondent in view 



l8o THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

of the glory which shall be revealed in us ? " For 
the earnest expectation of the creature," exclaims 
St. Paul, enamored of this high thought, " waiteth 
for the manifestation of the sons of God." 

That which St. Paul waited for we are waiting 
for still, and we are waiting for it hopefully ; for 
we have put our confidence in Jesus Christ : we 
have made up our minds to believe His word, and 
we trust Him when He says that a place is mak- 
ing ready for us in one of the many mansions of 
His father's house, and that if it were not so, He 
would have told us. 

Whether the special mansion or abiding-place, 
the occupancy of which has been secured for man 
by the incarnation of the Son of God, is to be this 
earth which we now inhabit, renovated and made 
fit for the larger needs and better uses that will 
belong to the heavenly life or not, we cannot cer- 
tainly know. Some sayings of Holy Scripture 
seem to point in this direction, while others more 
readily suggest distance and removal. It is a 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. l8l 

point upon which it has not pleased God to give 
us clear light. The things revealed, as we have 
had occasion to remember all through this enquiry, 
are few in number — surprisingly few, as compared 
with the things unrevealed. It is enough if whither 
He goes we know, and the way we know. The 
" whither " is upward ; the " way " is the way of His 
commandments. Looking ever in that direction, 
and keeping loyally to that way, we may hope to 
find a home at last in the mansion He is making 
ready. 

I have said that these words of our text, inter- 
preted as we have been interpreting them, add in- 
terest and dignity to life ; but, oh, how much 
solemnity they add also ! How is it with your 
daily life and mine? Are we living as men and 
women ought to live before whom eternity lies 
open ? Are heaven and hell, eternal life and 
eternal death, the realities to us which the Bible 
represents them ? Or are they mere cloud-pictures 
that float dreamily across the inner sky, noticed 



1 82 THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 

for a moment, and presently lost out of sight? 
Still it remains true, as one of the sturdiest and 
most downright of English thinkers put it long 
ago, that " things are what they are, and that 
their consequences will be what they will be," 
whether men believe or disbelieve. These two 
strong statements upon which our thoughts have 
dwelt this morning — are they true? If they are, 
then your not thinking them so, or my not think- 
ing them so, will make no difference whatsoever. 
One of these days we shall be waked from our 
fond dream, and roughly waked. Then we may 
discover, when all too late, that the mansion has 
been indeed made ready, but that we are not 
ready for it. I do not say this in the character of 
an alarmist. But soberly, seriously, quietly, I ask 
you to ask your own selves whether, if these things 
be worth thinking about at all, they are not worth 
thinking about with all the earnestness and con- 
centration you can command. There must have 
been times in the lives of most of us when we saw 



THE HEAVEN FOR MAN. 1 83 

plainly enough, if only for a little while, how 
empty and unprofitable and vain this earthly exist- 
ence is when taken out of connection with what 
is to follow. Immersed in affairs, the growth of 
the soul choked by a thousand temporal interests, 
we lose this true estimate of life, and take up 
with the false one instead ; but those are our best 
moments, our best days, our best years, when 
most we realize the certainty of what is to come, 
and when least we care for the short-lived satis- 
factions of the mortal life. They may not be our 
most frequent moments, days, or years; but, de- 
pend upon it, they are our best. 



NOTES. 

A. 

THE BEARING OF ST. PAUL'S POLEMICAL TRAIN- 
ING AS A PHARISEE UPON HIS USE OF THE 
EXPRESSION B,Gori aicDVWS AND KINDRED 
PHRASES. 

Widely as critics differ about the question 
whether belief in a future life did or did not ob- 
tain among the Hebrews before the close of the 
Old Testament Canon, all are agreed that in 
Christ's time the Jewish mind was keenly alive 
upon this point. The Pharisees, the orthodox 
party in the Church, took the positive side in the 
controversy ; the Sadducees, the " liberal " thinkers 
of that day, the negative side. " For the Saddu- 
cees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel 
nor spirit ; but the Pharisees confess both." (Acts 
xxiii : 8.) 

Paul, the son of a Pharisee, and the pupil of 
Gamaliel, a representative man of that straitest 
sect, must as a student of divinity have been early 
imbued with faith in a future life, and from the 

185 



1 86 NOTES. 

line he took on at least two occasions (at his 
arraignment before the high-priest Ananias, and 
in his Apologia pro Vita sua addressed to Agrippa) 
it would seem that as to this particular point of 
doctrine he held himself, after his conversion, to 
be more of a Pharisee than ever. 

Of his course at the former of these interviews 
we read that "when Paul perceived that the one 
part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, he 
cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am 
a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee : of the hope and 
resurrection of the dead I am called in question/' 
To the Herodian king his language is, "And 
now I stand and am judged for the hope of the 
promise made of God unto our fathers ; unto 
which promise our twelve tribes instantly serving 
God, day and night, hope to come. For which 
hope's sake, King Agrippa, I am accused of the 
Jews." 

The natural, perhaps the only, inference from 
such words is that Paul regarded his newly adopt- 
ed faith largely in the light of its being a grand re- 
enforcement and authentication of a belief which 
he had always held from childhood, only with this 
added feature and signal qualifying clause, that 
whereas he had formerly maintained the doctrine 
on abstract grounds of theological reasoning, he 
now linked it closely to the person of Christ, " the 



NOTES. I87 

first begotten of the dead," and preached, not 
simply the resurrection, but " Jesus and the resur- 
rection." 

It was this last feature which made his advocacy 
of the doctrine of eternal life, which otherwise 
would have been most acceptable, so offensive to 
the Pharisaic mind. 

Link this consideration to another presently to 
be stated, and the resulting inference will be very 
strong that what Paul preached was, Through 
Christ a life which cannot perish; apart from 
Christ, no everlasting life at all. 

The other consideration referred to is this. 
Knowing that to a Sadducee's thinking the only 
proper contrast to " eternal life " was extinction, 
cessation of being, "no resurrection," Paul would 
scarcely have expressed himself in the way he did 
about the future, had he meant to be understood 
as teaching the everlasting survival in conscious 
wretchedness of " them that perish." The Saddu- 
cees, and they probably in every city made up a 
large proportion of his Jewish auditory, would 
naturally and unless specially warned take what he 
said about the loss of eternal life as meaning the 
forfeiture of continued existence. Surely, had he 
meant them to understand it as an important part 
of his teaching that the losers of eternal life were, 
nevertheless, equally with the finders of it, to live 



1 88 NOTES. 

on forever, he would have told them so. But, in 
point of fact, we do not find that he ever did tell 
them so. 

Believers in the necessary immortality of the 
soul, when arguing among themselves, and with 
no one to dispute their postulate, may perhaps 
use the expression " life everlasting" in the sense 
of " unending blessedness " without danger of be- 
ing misunderstood. But Paul, we must remember, 
habitually addressed listeners who were divided 
as to the reasonableness of this very postulate, 
and on his lips such a lax use of synonymes, which 
cannot without much compulsion be made even to 
seem synonymous, would have been most blame- 
worthy. 



B. 



ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR ANALOGIES IN THE 
CASE OF THE SOUL. 

The alleged indestructibility of the " atom " has, 
ever since the days of Pythagoras, formed a basis 
with theists for belief in the endless survival of the 
soul. No doubt the atomist philosophy, as taught 
in the early Greek schools, had its atheistic develop- 
ments, but it was also, as Cudworth amply shows, 
open to a better interpretation, and capable of 



NOTES. 189 

being turned to the uses of belief. At any rate, 
Bishop Butler lends the great weight of his author- 
ity to a modified, and as one might say, Christian- 
ized form of this argument, when he writes, in the 
first chapter of The Analogy : " We have no way of 
determining by experience what is the certain bulk 
of the living being each man calls himself, and yet 
till it be determined that it is larger in bulk than 
the solid elementary particles of matter, which 
there is no ground to think any natural power can 
dissolve, there is no sort of reason to think death 
to be the dissolution of it, of the living being, even 
though it should not be absolutely indiscerptible." 

This is very carefully guarded language, and 
does not necessarily teach (observe the phrase, 
" natural power ") the indestructibility of man, but 
inasmuch as it seems to suggest the strong prob- 
ability of a permanent survival of all souls, it de- 
serves attention and reply from the advocate of 
conditional immortality. 

Butler's argument has usually been met by the 
method, always ungracious, and in this instance 
peculiarly infelicitous, of the reductio ad absurdum. 
This reductio has taken two forms : first, it has 
been alleged that the argument is one, which, if 
good for man, must be equally potent in behalf of 
the brutes ; and, secondly, that it suggests not 
only the sempiternity, but also the pre-existence 



190 NOTES. 

of the soul, according to the maxim of the atomists, 
well formulated, although in sport, by Persius : 

" De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti." 

But to the former of these enforced corollaries, 
no doubt many modern philanthropists, and pre- 
sumably the members of the " Society for the Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Animals/' would give a 
cheerful assent, while, as to the latter, it falls to 
the ground the moment Butler or his advocate 
chooses to say, " I am not only an atomist but a 
creationist." 

Since the publication of the Analogy, however, 
there have been discoveries made, which the 
illustrious author of that work would have been 
among the first to recognize, and the quickest to 
appreciate, even though they render, in the case 
of this particular argument of his, a resort to the 
reductio ad absurdum unnecessary for the over- 
throw of his reasoning. I refer to the distinction 
drawn in modern science between the " atom " 
and the " molecule." One of these, the molecule, 
is the ultimate unit of the physicist ; the other, the 
atom, the ultimate unit of the chemist. Butler's 
argument knows no such distinction, and yet in the 
light of it his conclusion falls powerless, since we 
are absolutely without any ground for determining 
whether the molecule or the atom be the true 



NOTES. I9I 

analogue of the soul, the essential man. Take, for 
example, one of the accepted definitions of the 
molecule, — A molecule of any substance (substance 
is here used in the popular, and not the meta- 
physical sense) is the smallest particle of such 
substance in which the qualities of it inhere. Evi- 
dently the molecule (which under the name of 
" atom" w r as a supposition in Butler's day, but 
has become for us an ascertained reality) is " the 
elementary particle " of the argument of The 
Analogy, and indeed it is the only elementary 
particle known now, so far as physics is concerned. 
But at this point steps in the chemist, and affirms 
that this " elementary " particle, which is the unit 
of all mechanical structure, is in his hands dis- 
cerptible, and that, as a matter of fact, it is con- 
stantly, in the processes of Nature, undergoing 
disruption. Here, for instance, is a molecule of 
the familiar substance called alum ; you cannot 
subdivide it mechanically, you cannot split it into 
smaller molecules, for then, under the terms of the 
definition above quoted, it would cease to be alum ; 
but you can, by methods of recombination, by 
bringing stronger affinities into play, sunder that 
molecule into atoms of aluminum, potassium, sul- 
phur, and oxygen — the true " elementary particles " 
of which it is composed. Now, my point is this, 
namely : that there is no more ground in reason 



192 NOTES. 

for comparing the "soul" (or whatever we may- 
please to call the human entity) to the "atom" 
of the chemist than there is for likening it to the 
" molecule " of the physicist. If forced to take up 
with either one or the other analogue, we might 
well (considering the manifold characteristics of 
human nature) give the preference to the molecule 
of a highly complex substance, rather than to the 
atom of an uncompounded element. But really 
there is no ground for any such discrimination. 
Science presents us with two sorts of units, the one 
dissoluble, the other not. Which of the two most 
accurately reflects the nature of the created soul, 
we are absolutely powerless to say. Hence the 
atomist argument, which is the strongest of all for 
the absolute immortality of the soul, must be ruled 
out of the discussion, and our conclusions as to 
human destiny based on other premises. 



THE TEACHING OF THE BOOK OF COMMON 
PRAYER AS TO LIFE IN CHRIST. 

As these Sermons will be likely to fall into the 
hands of some who, like the writer, are in the 



NOTES. 



193 



ministry of the Episcopal Church, and amenable 
to her discipline, it may be worth while to say 
something about the attitude of the Book of 
Common Prayer toward the doctrine here pre- 
ferred. 

Even for readers who are not Episcopalians 
such an enquiry need not be wholly without inter- 
est, for the Prayer-Book is, in a true sense, the 
heritage of all English-speaking people, and ap- 
peals to the educated mind through Arethusan 
channels that underlie, by a great depth, the 
moats and trenches of our "unhappy divisions." 

It is to be observed, then, that the Anglican 
formularies are not merely patient of such an in- 
terpretation as the doctrine of conditional immor- 
tality would require, but that they even seem to 
solicit it. 

Of course, it is not for a moment pretended that 
this result is traceable to any conscious purpose 
on the part of the compilers (or, rather, the re- 
visionists) of Edward's and Elizabeth's day to in- 
culcate the belief in question. The fact stands as 
it does simply in consequence of the perfectly 
loyal adherence on the part of those sixteenth- 
century scholars to the early Christian tradition, 
as that has come down embodied in the writings 
we call the New Testament. 

Because the Prayer-Book faithfully reflects Scrip- 

9 



194 NOTES. 

ture with all its antinomies as well as with all its 
harmonies; because the Prayer-Book is explicit 
where the Bible is explicit, and reticent where the 
Bible is reticent, therefore, and for no other rea- 
son, is it that the Prayer-Book presents condi- 
tional immortality as the likeliest purport of our 
Lord's teaching about the future of man. When 
it is remembered how thoroughly the popular the- 
ology of the Reformation period, both Roman and 
anti-Roman, was committed to the doctrine of 
endless torment, it seems little short of miracu- 
lous that the revised service-book of the national 
Church should have been kept clean from so 
great a blemish. That it was so kept is virtually 
affirmed in a judgment which, whatever its status 
in the dim region of ecclesiastical law, is certain- 
ly valuable as being the deliberately expressed 
opinion of a select number of clear-headed men 
specially trained to the careful interpretation of 
language.* 

But waiving the appeal to legal precedent and 
authority (a poor weapon at best in controversies 
about things divine), take the plain English of the 
Prayer-Book, as it stands before our eyes, and con- 
sider what is the most obvious and natural import 



*See judgment of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 
in the case of Wilson v. Fend all, 1864. 



NOTES. I95 

of so much of it as' touches the question of the 
final award. 

Instead of assuming the apologetic tone, I am 
bold to assert, that were a believer in the doctrine 
of " endless life only through Christ " to under- 
take the compilation of a liturgy, such as should 
best set forth, under a devotional form, the truth 
he desired to teach, he could not frame one better 
adapted to the purpose than that which already 
exists under the name of The Common Prayer. 
Of course the doctrine might be made more obtru- 
sive in a manual of worship contrived on purpose 
to express it ; but I am supposing the case of a 
liturgist who is not merely a man of one idea, 
but who works with a due regard to the propor- 
tion of the faith. 

And this point will be the more readily con- 
ceded, after attention has been drawn to the many 
instances in which the" czternus" of the old Church 
Latin has been rendered by the translators " ever- 
lasting/' rather than " eternal." For granting, 
for argument's sake (and it is a large concession), 
that our English "eternal" need not, any more 
than the Greek aicsovios, " necessarily connote end- 
less duration," it will still remain a thing impos- 
sible to say the same of " everlasting." It is con- 
ceivable that a sound exegesis might require us 
in some cases to accept the word " ungodly " as 



196 NOTES. 

the logical contradictory of "■ eternal ; " but no one 
will have the hardihood to claim for " everlasting " 
any other logical contradictory than " not lasting 
forever/' Hence, if the Prayer-Book be found rep- 
resenting "everlasting life" as a thing given to us 
only in Christ, it is a fair (not to say the only fair) 
interpretation of such language, to infer that all 
life which is cut off from Christ's life is a non-ever- 
lasting, perishable thing. 

So far as direct and precise dogmatic statement 
is concerned, the Prayer-Book is simply silent upon 
the point at issue. Having made in the two great 
catholic creeds its massive affirmation of the life 
everlasting, it rests content.* . 

No Article of the XXXIX. of the Church of 
England, or of the XXXVIII. of the American 
Protestant Episcopal Church, so much as touches 
the question. 

The history of the famous Forty-second Article, 
in which a negative view was once formulated, is 
well known. 

The Catechism is almost equally guarded in its 
language, although, by sanctioning, in one of its 
answers, the significant phrase (also employed in 

* The so-called Athanasian Creed (not in the American Book) 
has the expression " perish everlastingly " (absque dubio in ceternum 
petibit), an expression which most certainly does not imply a per- 
petuity of consciousness. 



NOTES. 197 

the Burial Office) " eternal death," it does suggest 
a conclusion which, as will be shown further on, 
grows easily out of its sacramental teaching. 

In the face of this reserve on the part of Articles 
and Catechism, we are thrown back for suggestions 
upon the devotional utterances of the Prayer-Book. 
And here, no doubt, there occurs at once to many 
minds the familiar deprecation of the Litany, 
" From everlasting damnation, Good Lord, deliver 
us," of which Mr. Blunt, in his Annotated Book of 
Common Prayer, says, " If the force of this depre- 
cation can be evaded in the interests of Univer- 
salism, no words can retain any meaning." But 
however formidable the bar which this phrase puts 
in the way of a restorationist interpretation of the 
formularies, it must be remembered that to the 
believer in the doctrine of conditional immortality 
it offers no difficulty whatever, since he accounts 
that to be strictly an everlasting damnation (a 
poena damni ceterna) which adjudges to the offender 
the inevitable loss of what is dearest to him of all 
things — his very existence. 

But only consider the phraseology employed 
when it is the positive side of the truth which is to 
be brought out (and for one word about depriva- 
tion, the Prayer-Book has twenty about bestowal), 
and the reasonableness of the strong claim that 
has been made will become plainer. 



198 NOTES. 

Almost at the threshold of the Morning Prayer, 
the Declaration of Absolution meets us with these 
words, " Confirm and strengthen you in all good- 
ness, and bring you to everlasting life .;" while in 
the " Prayer of St. Chrysostom," with which we 
close this same daily worship, there stand out dis- 
tinctly the two requests — first, that in this world 
present we may have the knowledge of God's truth, 
and, " in the world to come life everlasting." 

In one of the special prayers for use upon seve- 
ral occasions, we ask that we may be led to " apply 
our hearts unto that heavenly wisdom which in the 
end will bring us to everlasting life." 

In the first of the Advent collects, we pray that 
now, " in the time of this mortal life," we may so 
cast away the works of darkness that in the last 
day we may "rise to the life immortal ; " while in 
the second, we ask that " we may embrace and ever 
hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which 
thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ." 

The whole doctrine of conditional immortality 
may be said to be contained in these two collects. 

In the collect for the Sixth Sunday after the 
Epiphany, one leading purpose of the manifesta- 
tion of the Son of God is declared to have been 
that he might "make" us "heirs of eternal life." 

On the Sunday before Easter we are bidden to 
pray that we may not only be led to follow the 



NOTES. I99 

example of Christ's patience, but may also be 
" made partakers of His resurrection." 

At Easter, the day of all days when we should 
naturally look for sure indications of the truth about 
the world to come, we find the collect opening with 
this most suggestive invocation, " Almighty God, 
who through thine only begotten Son hast over- 
come death, and opened unto us the gate of ever- 
lasting life" and, again, in the " proper preface" 
for Easter, in the Holy Communion, we are met 
by language which, if possible, is stronger still : 
" who by his death hath destroyed death, and by 
his rising to life again, hath restored to us everlast- 
ing life." * 

And now, leaving quotations of this sort, which 
might be multiplied if there were need, and which, 
in a sense, are even more indicative of the spirit 
and temper of truly catholic theology than the 
most precise dogmatic definitions could be, let us 
pass to the Sacramental offices, and see whether 
there is anything in the structure of them that 
looks in the same direction. 

Take the form for the administration of the 
initial sacrament of the Church, the Baptismal Of- 
fice. This, when analyzed, is found to be built 

* The Sarum Missal has in this preface simply " Vitam resur- 
gendo reparavit " — a most powerful way of putting it. 



200 NOTES. 

upon the contrast drawn out by St. Paul between 
the first Adam and the second ; between man as 
he is in his natural helplessness, and man as he is 
when lifted up and restored in Christ. The idea 
is that the child is transferred from the state 
typified by the first man which " is of the earth, 
earthy/' to that state now made possible under 
the second man, which is " the Lord from heaven.'' * 
Accordingly we begin by asking in behalf of the 
child for something " which by nature he cannot 
have," and a little further on, we find the climax 
of our prayer for him in the beautiful petition that 
he "may so pass the waves of this troublesome 

* The song of the "Fifth Choir of Angelicals," in Dr. New- 
man's Drea.7?i of Gerontius, might almost be adapted to the uses 
of a baptismal hymn : 

" O Joving wisdom of our God ! 
When all was sin and shame, 
A second Adam to the fight 
And to the rescue came. 

"O wisest love ! that flesh and blood 
Which did in Adam fail, 
Should strive afresh against their foe, 
Should strive, and should prevail; 

" And that a higher gift than grace 
Should flesh and blood refine, 
God's presence and His very Self, 
And essence all divine." 



NOTES. 201 

world that finally he may come to the land of 
everlasting life'' Let any one who will take the 
trouble to do so only read the Baptismal Service 
once through from beginning to end, upon the sup- 
position that everlasting life is the gift of God 
through Christ, and he may be surprised to find 
how many of the difficulties under which the lan- 
guage of that formulary has been supposed to 
labor will disappear before such an interpretation. 
It is not claimed, of course, that Baptism imparts, 
ipso facto, the gift of eternal life, but rather that it 
introduces the subject of it to all those influences 
and helps which may best dispose his mind " to- 
wards the attainment of everlasting salvation." 

Look in a like spirit at the symbolism of the 
Eucharist, the other great sacrament " ordained 
by Christ Himself." Has it not, over and above 
its commemorative character, retrospective of the 
sacrificial death of Christ, another aspect kindred 
to this, and yet distinct, namely, the presentation 
of the Son of God as One whom we are to feed 
upon in order that we may be strengthened and 
built up in that life which alone is permanent and 
abiding? Without food our natural bodies shrivel 
and perish ; is not one chief significance of the 
Holy Communion this, that similarly our souls 
must starve and die if they also are not fed? 
Christ plants anew in the garden of His Church 
9* 



202 NOTES. 

that tree of life on which the door of the first Par- 
adise was shut. Certainly no plainer interpreta- 
tion can possibly be suggested for the words of 
delivery : 

"The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was 
given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto 
everlasting life/ r 

" The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was 
shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto 
everlasting life." 

And the Catechism rightly represents the pur- 
port of this sacrament as being two-fold, for in 
answer to the question, " Why was the sacrament 
of the Lord's Supper ordained?" the child is 
taught to reply, not only that it was " for the con- 
tinual remembrance of the sacrifice of the death of 
Christ," but also that it was for the continual re- 
membrance of " the benefits which we receive 
thereby " — benefits afterward summed up as fol- 
lows: "The strengthening and refreshing of our 
souls by the body and blood of Christ, as our 
bodies are by the bread and wine." Thus faith- 
fully, in prayer, in creed, and in sacramental sym- 
bolism, does the Anglican manual of worship reflect 
the great central truth of the revelation of Jesus 
Christ : " I AM COME THAT YE MIGHT HAVE LIFE, 
AND THAT YE MIGHT HAVE IT MORE ABUNDANT- 
LY." 



Conditional Immortality. 

PLAIN SERMONS ON A TOPIC OF PRESENT INTEREST. By the Rev. 
William R. Huntington, D.D., Rector of All Saints Church, Worcester. 

Contents: — The Eternal Purpose— The Argument for Retribution — Possible 
Forms of Penalty — The Hypothesis of Everlasting Torment — The Hypothesis 
of Final Restoration — The Hypothesis of Conditional Immortality — The Like- 
liest Belief— Christ's Law of Survival — The Heaven for Man— Appendix of 

Notes. i2mo $1.00. 

"When once this weighty question of the after-life has been opened, a con- 
troversy will ensue in the progress of which it will be discovered that, with 
unobservant eyes, we and our predecessors have been so walking up and down and 
running hither and thither, among dim notices and indications of the future des- 
tinies of the human family, as to have failed to gather up or to regard much that 
has lain upon the pages of the Bible, open and free to our use." — Isaac Taylor. 

Letters to a Young Clergyman. 

By the Rev. John C. Miller, D.D., Canon Residentiary of Rochester, Eng- 
land. i2mo $i-75- 

" A clergyman of mature years, who has labored diligently at his sacred calling, 
and carried out his principles with zeal and energy, may properly take upon him- 
self the part of counsellor to his younger brethren, and endeavor to prepare them 
for their work by opening the stores of his own wide experience. Canon Miller's 
' Letters' are such as we should expect from him — practical, sincere, large-hearted. 
Canon Miller urges strongly the absolute necessity of method in apportioning 
time to the various duties of the ministry, the absolute necessity of study to enable 
a man to teach and preach effectively, and the absolute necessity of regular prayer 
if the priestly character is to live and grow." — Literary Churchman. 

Some Difficulties of Belief. 

By the Rev. T. Teignmouth Shore, M.A., Incumbent of Berkeley Chapel, May- 
fair. From Fourth London Edition. i2mo. 320 pages $i»75« 

" Mr. Shore is a clear, strong thinker, and he puts his points in a lucid, popular 
form. The volume will be very helpful to religious minds who feel the pressure 
of such difficulties. The volume is in every way wise, and strong, and seasonable." 
— The British Quarterly Review. 

" This is a volume of sermons for the publication of which no apology is needed. 
They are earnest, and often eloquent. The difficulties of belief are treated by 
appeals to human experience." — The Spectator. 

"This volume gives abundant evidence of the thoughtful mind of the writer, 
and no less of his originality of thought. . . . The manner in which Mr. 
Shore has simplified some of the difficulties of Scripture and placed them in their 
real, and therefore in their only truthful light, no less than the earnest and 
reverent tone which accompanies the close argument and deep thought which 
mark the volume throughout, may well commend it to the devout student of 
Scripture."— John Bull. 



Salvator Mundi; 



OR, IS CHRIST THE SAVIOUR OF ALL MEN ? By the Rev. Samuel 
Cox. i2mo $1.25. 

' l We are bound to acknowledge the ability, the richness of textual resources, 
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" Readers of this volume will admire the candor and scholarly thoroughness 
with which he (Mr. Cox) has done his work. The same loyalty to Scripture, exe- 
getical tact, and power of lucid exposition that mark his contributions towards 
the exposition of" the Word of God, are abundantly manifest here." — English 
Independent. 

E. P. BUTTON & CO M Publishers, New York. 



By the Rev. FREDERICK W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., 

Canon of Westminster. 



Eternal Hope. 



FIVE SERMONS PREACHED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY IN 1877. 

Contents: What Heaven is — Is Life Worth Living? — " Hell," what it is Not — 

Are there Few that be Saved ? — Earthly and Future Consequences of Sin — 

Preface, Notes, etc. i2mo, 285 pages. $1.00. 

lt We think it is hardly too much to say that this is the most important and valu- 
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reading on both sides of the controversy." 

Language and Languages : 

Being "Chapters on Language" and " Families of Speech." i2mo. 431 pages. $2.50 
tl Has most solid value and considerable popular interst also. The subject is 
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The Life of Christ. 

1 vol., 8vo, without Notes, cloth $2.50 

2 vols., 8vo, with Maps, Notes, and Appendix, large print, cloth 5.00 

2 vols., 8vo, half calf. 10.00 

" The great value of the book consists in the connected view it presents of the 
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which they may turn, each occurrence being presented with completeness and 
with grace of narration, and it will acquaint them with fresh sources of informa- 
tion and new aspects of familiar events." — Times. 

u Dr. Farrar may certainly be congratulated upon a literary success to which 
the annals of English theology present no parallel. . . It is impossible, in the space 
at our disposal, to do justice to what we feel the most valuable element of Dr. 
Farrar's work — the art, namely, with which he places us in the presence of the 
Great Teacher, and enables us not merely to follow the trains of His thought, but 
often to detect their subtle source or trace them in their secret working upon the 
minds of friendly or hostile listeners," — Quarterly Review. 

The Silence and the Voices of God. 

With other Sermons. i2mo. 237 pages $1.00 

The College Library, 

Eric ; or, Little by Little. A Tale of Roslyn School. St. Winifred ; or, The 
World of School. Julian Home : A Tale of College Life. New and improved 

edition. Each volume $1.50 ; three volumes in box $4-5© 

** Possess all the charm which made l School Days at Rugby' so popular, while 
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E. P. BUTTON & CO., Publishers, New York, 



Christ in the Christian Year, 

AND IN THE LIFE OF MAN. Sermons for Laymen's Reading. (Advent to 
Trinity.) By the Rt. Rev. F. D. Huntington, D.D. i2mo. 404 pages. $1.50 
11 While the book will be found highly suitable for laymen's reading, whether in 
public or private, the clergy will find it, like the previous volumes of the same au- 
thor, full of food for thought." — Church Journal. 

" From one of the ablest divines and ripest scholars of the Church of America." 
— Boston Traveler. 

" The volume will have, no doubt, a much wider mission than that of being 
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est worth cannot be seen except as it is carefully studied. The work is one which, 
as regards tone and thought and diction, will compare favorably with the best pro- 
ductions of contemporary divines in the English Church." — Churchman. 

Lectures on Preaching. 

Delivered before the Divinity School of Yale College in January and February, 

1877, by the Rev. Phillips Brooks. 4th Thousand. i2mo. 281 pages. Si. 50 

" These are admirable lectures. Nothing better of the kind, nothing-more really 
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M We do not hesitate to say that they are of more practical value than any work 
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creased." — Illustrated Christian Weekly. 

" No man, lay or clerical, who likes bright thoughts and clear artistic expression, 
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" Every page of the volume is replete with practical wisdom and sound common 
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of the results of the study of a mind keenly alive to the demands of the age, and 
the needs and influence of the ministry." — The Appeal. 

11 Will be found as useful to young laymen as to young clergymen. Their coun- 
sels, with certain changes in detail, are as applicable to the pursuits of business 
life, in whatever vocation, as to the duties of the pastorate. It is a book we com- 
mend to every young man and woman desirous of efficient work and noble living." 

Studies on the New Testament. 

By F. Godet, d.d., Professor of Theology, Neuchatel. Contents : I. The Origin 
of the Four Gospels. Ii. Jesus Christ. III. The Work of Jesus Christ. IV. 
The Four Principal Apostles. V. The Apocalypse. Edited by Rev. W. H. 
Lytteltox, m.a. Small 8 vo, 408 pages. $2. 25. 

" We commend this very thoughtful, suggestive, and artistic volume to our read- 
ers." — British Quarterly Review. 

" Unquestionably, INI. Godet is one of the first, if not the very first, of contem- 
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" These studies coyer the whole of the New Testament. It would be hard to 
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all students of the New Testament to possess themselves of it." — The Expositor. 

The Sayings of the Great Forty Days, 

Between the Resurrection and Ascension, regarded as the Outlines of the King- 
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Theory of Development. By George Moberly, d.c.l., Bishop of Salisbury. 
Fourth, edition, crown 8vo. $2.00. 

" AVeknow of no better reading for the season on which we are now entering 
than this volume." — Churchman. 

E. P. BUTTON & CO., Publishers, New York. 



THE NEW BIBLE COMMENTARY. 



NOW READY, the FIRST VOLUME of 

The New Testament Commentary 

FOR ENGLISH READERS. 

Edited by C. J. ELLICOTT, D.D., 

Lord Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. 
CONTAINING 

The GOSPEL according to ST. MATTHEW, ST. MARK, arid 

ST. LUKE. By the Rev. E. H. PLUMPTRE, D.D., Vicar of Bickley, Pro- 
fessor of Divinity, King's College, London. 

The GOSPEL according to ST. JOHN. By the Eev. W. H. 

WATKINS, M.A., Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy, King's College, 

London. Quarto^ 563 pages $6„oo 

(To be completed in Three Volumes.) 

THE REMAINING BOOKS BY 

The Rev. W. SAND AY, M.A., Principal of Hatfield Hall, Durham. 

The Rev. ALFRED BARRY, D.D., Principal of King's College, London, and 
Canon of Worcester Cathedral. 

The Rev. A. J. MASON, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge ; Examin- 
ing Chaplain to the Bishop of Truro. 

The Rev. H. D. M. SPENCE, M.A., Hon. Canon of Gloucester Cathedral, and 
Vicar of St. Pancras. 

The Rev. W. F. MOULTON, D.D., Principal of the Wesleyan College, The 
Leys, Cambridge. 

The Rev. T. TEIGNMOUTH SHORE, M.A., Incumbent of Berkeley Chapel 
Mayfair. 

The Rev. W. BOYD CARPENTER, M.A., Vicar of St. James's, Holloway. 



11 The present Commentary may in many respects claim to be considered as new 
in its design and construction, and as an attempt to supply a need which has been 
long and seriously felt by meditative readers of God's Holy Word. * * * 

" These, then, are the two broad classes of readers — those who doubt the full 
authority of Scripture, but would rejoice to have those doubts dissipated, and that 
much larger class that (by God's blessing) doubt not, but desire more fully to 
realize and to understand : these are the two classes who have been ever present to 
the thoughts of the writers of this Commentary, and for whom especially they have 
undertaken this work." — From the Preface by Bishop Ellicott, 

" This is a worlc by thorough scholars and careful exegetes, intended for the use 
of those unable to read the sacred text in its original languages, and to put them in 
possession of its exact sense, at the same time carefully maintaining that higher 
exegesis than any mere grammatical analysis can supply — the development and ex- 
hibition of the inner life and meaning of the sacred writers." — British Quarterly 
Review. 

m "For the first time it is possible now to answer promptly and without qualifica,, 
tioa the question every minister has asked him from time to time, What Com- 
mentary do you recommend ? " — Rev. Wm. R. Huntington, D.D. 

11 It is a most interesting volume, and promises invaluable help to the classes of 
Bible students for whom it is intended, help which I do not know how they can 
gain elsewhere." — Rev. Phillips Brooks, D.D. 

E. P. DUTTON & CO., Publishers, New York. 



THE NEW BIBLE COMMENTARY. 



" In republishing Bishop Ellicott's commentary, E. P. Dutton & Co. have done a 
service that will be recognized at once, but more and more appreciated in the future. 
It is a service not only to the promotion of scriptural knowledge in the intelligent 
class of our laymen and the families in our congregations, but to the minds and 
teachings of the many clergymen among us who are not able to place in their 
own libraries the more costly and elaborate exegetical works. We began to examine 
the work from curiosity, but have found as we went on that the two accomplished 
and discriminating critics, Dr. Plumptre and Prof. Watkins, who have done the 
greater part of the labor thus far, have furnished so much fresh matter and have so 
compactly and clearly presented the results of recentinquiry on many interesting 
topics, that we have continued reading for edification. Scholars will of course 
seek access to a more ample apparatus; but whoever knows all that is here written 
will be wise in the Word of God. In the notes there is not only explanation of 
the text, but original thought and reverent handling of the things of the Spirit. In 
each introduction and excursus there is a union of generous freedom with sound 
judgment which inspires confidence and rewards study." — Bishop Huntington 
in '* The Gospel Messenger.' 1 '' 

" The widespread reputation of Bishop Ellicott as a scholar and commentator 
created a general desire that his new work should as soon as possible be reissued 
on this side of the Atlantic. The reported fact that within a few days of its pub- 
lication in England the whole of the first edition had been disposed of rendered the 
desire for an American edition still more intense. Thanks to the energy and en- 
terprise of Messrs. Dutton & Co., the stately volume is now accessible to all here, 
and, let us add, in a form which leaves nothing to be desired either in print or 
paper. . . . As to the notes themselves, we have no hesitation in saying that in our 
opinion they constitute a marked advance on any similar commentary wiih which 
we are acquainted. They denote on the part of the authors an honest desire fairly 
to meet all real difficulties; and in order to enable themselves to do so successfully, 
they have freely, but judiciously, drawn upon the various kinds of material which 
are now at the disposal of commentators on the Bible. They have put within 
reach of the merely English reader many of the established results of the later and 
higher biblical criticism; and to do this in a truly reverent manner, and without 
surrendering any essential text or doctrine, was as great a task as it was a great 
desideratum in English." — Churchman. 

vt No commentary designed l for English readers ' comes anywhere near it, 
whether for spiritual insight and suggestiveness, or exact scholarship, or wide 
erudition, or resolute handling of difficulties." — Expositor. 

" 1 cannot longer postpone the expression of my thankfulness that such a work 
has been placed within the reach of American as well as English readers, and 
that thinking people, who, though not familiar with the tongue in which the 
Bible was written, are yet abreast of much of the culture and criticism of our time, 
have, in this volume, a work that so wisely and courageously meets that criticism. 
For manliness, candor, and an absolute freedom from all bondage to outworn 
conventions of criticism, this book is above all praise. And yet its tone of rever- 
ence, its clear and positive teaching concerning essential points, is equal^ praise- 
worthy. It is inexpressibly refreshing to open a commentary which deals with 
living questions in so thoroughly a living way. ... It is a work which every- 
body who reads and thinks ought to possess. It is adapted, with a rare felicity, 
to clear up perplexities, and to strengthen and confirm a devout and rational faith. 
— Rev. H. C. Potter, D.D. 

" Clergymen will be helped by it in their spiritual understanding of the New 
Testament, but the ordinary reader will find in it, first, that general and candid 
statement of the actual position in which the sacred writings stand, which is neces- 
sary to enable one to approach them with clear intelligence, and, then, that in- 
cisive kind of comment which reaches to the inner and spiritual significance of the 
text, while it does not disregard the usual explanatory apparatus, or hesitate to 
express everything in unpedan tic English. The work grows upon one, and there 
is nothing in it which can be spared, or which any one can well pass by. For the 
average student of Scripture it is decidedly the best work of the kind which we 
have." — N. Y. Times. 

E. P. DUTTON & CO., Publishers, New York. 



" By the death of Canon Mozley the English Church has lost one of its most 
original thinkers ; . . . for depth of insight into the moral and intellectttal 
principles at work in Revelation, and for skill in illustrating that insight, he 
was certainly without a rival in the English Church of our generation,'''' — 
Spectator (London). 



University Sermons, 

Preached before the University of Oxford, and on various occasions. By the 
Rev. J. B. Mozley, D.D. New edition. i2mo. 318 pages Si. 75 

" Must almost make an epoch in the thoughts and history of any one who reads 
them and really takes in what they say." — London Times. 

" We are not exaggerating when we say that no such sermons have been preached 
from any pulpit in Christendom for many years." — Church Journal. 

"We do not hesitate to say that they are by far the most thoughtful and vigorous 
discourses we have ever seen from the pen of any dignitary of the Established 
Church of England."— The Christian Register. 

" No sermons since Newman's have shown such power in stating what is obvious 
to any one the moment it is stated, in language which, like the poet's rhythm, all 
can appreciate, and very few can imitate." — New York Times. 

Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, 

AND THEIR RELATIONS TO OLD TESTAMENT FAITH. Lectures 
delivered to Graduates of the University of Oxford. By the Rev. J. B. Mozley, 
D.D. 8vo. 311 pages $2.50 

" The volume will be prized by every earnest student of the Sacred Scriptures, 
and the name of Mozley will mark a new starting-point in the defence of the Old 
Testament." — Christia?i at Work. 

" This is one of the most remarkable books in the department of theology that 
has appeared in the present generation. Dr. Mozley has won a place in the fore- 
most rank of religious philosophers. His University Sermons deservedly make his 
name prominent as a keen and close thinker. But this volume marks a new pra in 
the history of Christian ethics. It is a bold but successful attempt to explain the 
peculiar morality recognized in certain transactions of the Old Testament upon 
rational grounds. For the first time in our experience we have met with a satis- 
factory solution of what all students of the Bible have felt to be a most difficult 
problem. . . . We commend Dr. Mozley's work as one which will accomplish in 
our day what Bishop Butler's did in his. It is one which should be read and 
studied by everybody. If it does not clear up much that is now dark to the aver- 
age theological mind, we shall have been mistaken." — Churchman. 

Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine 

of Predestination. 

By the Rev. J. B. Mozley, D.D. New edition. 121110. 400 pages $2.75 

Eight Lectures on the Miracles. 

Being the Bampton Lectures for 1865. By the Rev. J. B. Mozley, D.D. New 
edition. i2ino. 336 pages $2.00 

" The best modern treatise on the difficult subject to which it is devoted." — 
Christian at Work. 

IN PRESS. 

Essays by Canon Mozley, 

A Collection of his Contributions to various Quarterly Reviews. 2 vols. 8vo. 
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